Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 8, “Confessions” (p. 188)
“Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.”
—
Ian McDonald
,
book
The Tear
In Galactic Empires, edited by Gardner Dozois, reprinted in Rich Horton (ed.), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009 (p. 506)
Short fiction, The Tear (2008)
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Ian McDonald 30
British science fiction novelist 1960Related quotes
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Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.