“Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.”
Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, p. viii.
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Michael Dirda 3
American literary critic 1948Related quotes

“For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.”
The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004) – from the introduction to "Visible Light"

"The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
“First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.”
Ibid.
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 1

“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
“All good science is art. And all good art is science.”
Daniel Martin (1977)

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 145-146

Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume http://www.dorislessing.org/boston.html (February 1998)