
“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
Source: The Corrections
"How Easy to See the Future", Natural History magazine (April 1975);
General sources
“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
Source: The Corrections
In Joy Still Felt (1980), pp. 286-287
General sources
“Science is not inevitable; this question is very fruitful indeed.”
In personal correspondence, quoted in Elisabeth Nemeth's chapter "Logical Empiricism and the History and Sociology of Science" in the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (2007) edited by Alan W. Richardson and Thomas Uebel.
“Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.”
Robot Dreams (1986), introduction
General sources
Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 356
As quoted in The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (1964) by James Blish, p. 14
“Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.”
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
World Design Science Decade 1965-1975 Phase I (1965), Document 3 : Comprehensive Thinking, "Venus Proximity Day", p. 33 http://challenge.bfi.org/sites/challenge.bfi.org/files/pdf_files/wdsd_phase1_doc3.pdf
1960s
Context: One of my working assumptions which has been proven successful so often as seemingly to qualify it as a reliable tenet is that A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically. Others have probably stated the principle in many ways. The assumption is that the inevitability of a solution's realization is inherent in the interaction of human intellect and the constantly transformative evolution of physical universe. At first the, only subconsciously apprehended, approaching confluences of complex events make themselves known intuitively within the intellectual weather. Then comes a gradually awakening consciousness of the presence of new families of differentiating-out challenging concepts of every day prominence. It is with these randomly patterning families of separate concepts that evolution is about to deal integratively. As a now specific unitary problem it may be disposed of effectively when and if that unified problem becomes "adequately stated" and thereby comprehensibly solvable.