“An impossibility is just a possibility you don’t understand yet”

Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.

Variant: So many things are possible as long as you don't know they're impossible.
Source: The Phantom Tollbooth

Source: Digital Fortress

Possibility http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/possibility-3/ <br class="br">From the poems written in English

Source: Boneshaker (2009), p. 265

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 12 (p. 177).

Saints (1983)

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Source: God’s War (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 235).