On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?
“Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.”
Orbit interview (2002)
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David Brin 123
novelist, short story writer 1950Related quotes
Source: Broca's Brain (1979), Chapter 9, “Science Fiction—A Personal View” (p. 172)
Interview in 'Kill Screen', 2012 https://killscreen.com/articles/stories-about-orcs-and-rape-man-behind-arse-elektronika/
Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume http://www.dorislessing.org/boston.html (February 1998)
“Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.”
Source: How To Write Science Fiction
“Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
As quoted in The Faces of Science Fiction (1984) by Patti Perret
As quoted in The Making of Kubrick's 2001 (1970) by Jerome Agel, p. 300
1970s
Context: One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories. Two-thirds of 2001 is realistic — hardware and technology — to establish background for the metaphysical, philosophical, and religious meanings later.