The Novel: What It Is (1893)
Fraser's Magazine, New Series, vol. 5 (1872) p. 160
"The Nightingale of Keats"
Other Inquisitions (1952)
The Rome Press Conference (23 July 2001)
Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw2.html of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Four star reviews
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 26.
That Style Thingie (1998 Essay)
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/saving-silverman-2001 of Saving Silverman (9 February 2001)
Reviews, Half-star reviews
Afterword to Exposures, p. 246
In Alien Flesh (1986)
Michael Wolfe One Thousand Roads to Mecca (New York: Grove Press, 1999) p. 75.
Criticism
Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume http://www.dorislessing.org/boston.html (February 1998)
"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000) http://www.clancyfaq.com/Clancy%20Speaks%20Again%20Briefly.htm
2000s
Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005)
Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw1.html of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).
Four star reviews
“Science fiction offers its writers chances of embarrassment that no other form of fiction does.”
Robot Dreams (1986), introduction
General sources
Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 1, The Second Crisis of Economic Theory, p. 3
Patheos, Correspondence with a Creationist http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/06/06/correspondence-with-a-creationist/ (June 6, 2017)
Chpt.2, p. 12
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1
Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Jack Arnold in The Horror People http://eric.b.olsen.tripod.com/arnold.html (1976)
An Old Chaos: The Call of Progress (pp. 6-7)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 102
“Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.”
Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 67.
"Locations: An Introduction" (p. xvi)
American Fictions (1999)
Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
“Fiction is never admitted where truth may work.”
Wright v. Gerrard (1617), Lord Hobart's Rep. 311.
"Editorial: The Reluctant Critic", in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Vol. 2, Issue 6, (12 November 1978) https://archive.org/stream/Asimovs_v02n06_1978-11-12/<!-- Asimovs_v02n06_1978-11-12_djvu.txt -->
General sources
#139
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
Corriere della Sera http://web.archive.org/web/20151108234947/http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/1997/luglio/06/Caso_Moro_non_piu_nulla_co_0_9707062761.shtml, 7 June 1997, p. 35.
1950s - 1990s
" Changing our Minds http://peacecenter.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2009winter/Oatley653.php," originally published in Changing our Minds magazine.
"Moll Flanders", in With Eye and Ear (1970), p. 13
2000s, What is free software? (2006)
“Science fiction … means what we point to when we say it.”
[In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction, 1956, Advent Publishers, page 1, ISBN 0911682074]
Budget speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/apr/17/financial-statement in the House of Commons (17 April 1934)
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Diari 1957-78, ed. Rizzoli, 26 September 1972.
1950s - 1990s
"Extreme Pornography Law in the UK" (2010) http://stallman.org/articles/extreme.html
2010s
"The Right of Things to Come", presentation for the Science Fiction Research Association (1978), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction
interview with 3am http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html
“The difference between me and you is that I do good fiction.”
Jokingly to news reporters. Speech at the National Press Club (18 May 1999).
1990s
"Interview" at his official website http://www.michaelastackpole.com/?page_id=8
“I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’.”
In a panel about his work in Comic Con 2010. Quoted in China Miéville Takes Comic Con http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/08/china-mieville-takes-comic-con.
“Well, ABC, NBC, CBS: Bullshit.
They give us fact or fiction?
I guess an even split.”
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)
"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004)
If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)
“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 85
Styles of Radical Will (1966)
On Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
1960s, Presidential Address, 1969
Source: Steady-State Economics, 1977, p. 24
Source: "Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure", 1976, p. 310
A Voice from the Attic (1960)
“All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
Quoted in Mickey Pearlman, Listen to Their Voices (1993), ch. 12
“I wish I was fiction, I wish I was fact.”
God Protect Your Soul
The Library of Foresight, edition 3 of The Trilogy by John Sai, p. iii.
[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?, https://books.google.com/books?id=GmlB-KXsX8kC&pg=PA347, 2003, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-028-0, 347]
The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (1613)
"The Furniture Rule", explaining the differences and similarities between the fields of weird fiction in Dreamsongs
“Non-fiction contains facts, fiction contains truth.”
Next Testament (Boom Studios, 2014)
Interviewed on Tested http://www.tested.com/art/movies/442545-2d-animation-digital-era-interview-japanese-director-makoto-shinkai/
About Your Name
"The Discovery of the Future," Guest of Honor Speech, 3rd World Science Fiction Convention, Denver, Colorado (4 July 1941)
The Well of Lost Plots (2003), ch.1, p. 11
“One writer quite cutely remarks that his best work of fiction was his Income Tax Return.”
The Pageant of Life (1964), On Writers
“The real plot in fiction parallels life in that it happens within the characters.”
Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)
“Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.”
Interview at the World Science Fiction Convention (25 June 1998) http://www.chicon.org/gohs/turtldov.htm
Anwar Shaikh, Islam, The Arab National Movement, 1995. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)
Interview with Kevin Barry (c. 2012)
“Sometimes the best way to find the truth is to create a fiction.”
From Interviews
"Control of Human Behavior", item 160
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)
In his introduction "Van is Here, But Van is Gone" to Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt (July 1999) http://www.sfrevu.com/ISSUES/2000/ARTICLES/20000128-03.htm
Context: Alfred E. van Vogt, since the appearance of his first two stories — "Black Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" (Astounding Science Fiction, July and December 1939) the most memorable debut in the long history of the genre — has been a giant. The words seminal and germinal leap to mind. Sadly, at this juncture. the words tragedy and farewell also insinuate themselves. … Van is still with us, as I write this, in June of 1999, slightly less than fifty years since I first encountered van Vogt prose in a January 1950 issue of Startling Stories, but Van is gone. He is no longer with us. … Because the great and fecund mind of A. E. van Vogt has fallen into the clutches of that pulp thriller demon, Alzheimer's. Van is gone. … Anyone's demise or vanishment is in some small way tragic but the word "tragedy" requires greater measure for its use. … Van' s great mind now gone. Tragedy.
The ultimate tragic impropriety visited on as good a man as ever lived. A gentle. soft spoken man who was filled with ideas and humor and courtesy and kindness. Not even those who were not aficionados of Van's writing could muster a harsh word about him as a human being. He was as he remains now, quietly and purposefully, a gentleman.
But make no mistake about this: the last few decades for him were marred by the perfidious and even mean spirited and sometimes criminal acts of poltroons and self-aggrandizing mountebanks and piss-ants into whose clutches he fell just before the thug Alzheimer got him. … I came late to the friendship with Van and Lydia. Perhaps only twenty-five or so years. But the friendship continues, and at least I was able to make enough noise to get Van the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, which was presented to him in full ceremony during one of the last moments when he was cogent and clearheaded enough understand that finally, as last, dragged kicking and screaming to honor him, the generation that learned from what he did and what he had created had, at last, fessed up to his importance.
Naturally, others took credit for his getting the award. They postured and spewed all the right platitudes. Some of them were the same ones who had said to me — during the five years it took to get them to act honorably — "we'd have given it to him sooner if you hadn't made such a fuss." Yeah. Sure. And pandas'll fly out of my ass.
"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" first published in The Dial No. 73 (July 1922)
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
Context: I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.
Preface
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Context: Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral, — the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankind — or, indeed, any one man — of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, — or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, — thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.
“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.
Locus interview (1998)
Context: The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers. I have always lived in a world in which I'm just a spot in history. My life is not the important point. I'm just part of the continuum, and that continuum, to me, is a marvelous thing. The history of life, and the history of the planet, should go on and on and on and on. I cannot conceive of anything in the universe that has more meaning than that.
Games for Actors and non-Actors (1992)
Context: In truth the Theatre of the Oppressed has no end, because everything which happens in it must extend into life…. The Theatre of the Oppressed is located precisely on the frontier between fiction and reality – and this border must be crossed. If the show starts in fiction, its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life. Now in 1992, when so many certainties have become so many doubts, when so many dreams have withered on exposure to sunlight, and so many hopes have become as many deceptions – now that we are living through times and situations of great perplexity, full of doubts and uncertainties, now more than ever I believe it is time for a theatre which, at its best, will ask the right questions at the right times. Let us be democratic and ask our audiences to tell us their desires, and let us show them alternatives. Let us hope that one day – please, not too far in the future – we’ll be able to convince or force our governments, our leaders, to do the same; to ask their audiences – us – what they should do, so as to make this world a place to live and be happy in – yes, it is possible – rather than just a vast market in which we sell our goods and our souls. Let’s hope. Let’s work for it!
Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.
Conversation with George MacBeth on Third Programme (BBC) (1 February 1967), published in The New S.F. (1969), edited by Langdon Jones
Context: I think the new science fiction, which other people apart from myself are now beginning to write, is introverted, possibly pessimistic rather than optimistic, much less certain of its own territory. There's a tremendous confidence that radiates through all modern American science fiction of the period 1930 to 1960; the certainty that science and technology can solve all problems. This is not the dominant form of science fiction now. I think science fiction is becoming something much more speculative, much less convinced about the magic of science and the moral authority of science. There's far more caution on the part of the new writers than there was.
In "Correspondence: From Hell" Alan Moore & Dave Sim, part 3, Cerebus #219, (2003)
Context: Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests
Context: About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system of female non-education or quietism still prevails.My fear is that, with the best intentions, this policy has been carried so far as to react injuriously on the Male Sex.For the consequence is that, as things now are, we Males have to lead a kind of bi-lingual, and I may almost say bi-mental, existence. With Women, we speak of "love", "duty", "right", "wrong", "pity", "hope", and other irrational and emotional conceptions, which have no existence, and the fiction of which has no object except to control feminine exuberances; but among ourselves, and in our books, we have an entirely different vocabulary and I may almost say, idiom. "Love" then becomes "the anticipation of benefits"; "duty" becomes "necessity" or "fitness"; and other words are correspondingly transmuted. Moreover, among Women, we use language implying the utmost deference for their Sex; and they fully believe that the Chief Circle Himself is not more devoutly adored by us than they are: but behind their backs they are both regarded and spoken of — by all except the very young — as being little better than "mindless organisms".
infinity plus interview (2001)
Context: The battle between good and evil is a legitimate theme for a Fantasy (or for any work of fiction, for that matter), but in real life that battle is fought chiefly in the individual human heart. Too many contemporary Fantasies take the easy way out by externalizing the struggle, so the heroic protagonists need only smite the evil minions of the dark power to win the day. And you can tell the evil minions, because they're inevitably ugly and they all wear black.
I wanted to stand much of that on its head.
In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.
Myth and Reality (1963)
Context: For the past fifty years at least, Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from, let us say, that of the nineteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is, as "fable," "invention," "fiction," they have accepted it as it was understood in archaic societies, where, on the contrary, "myth" means a "true story" and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant. This new semantic value given the term "myth" makes its use in contemporary parlance somewhat equivocal. Today, that is, the word is employed both in the sense of "fiction" or "illusion" and in that familiar especially to ethnologists, sociologists, and historians of religions, the sense of "sacred tradition, primordial revelation, exemplary model." … the Greeks steadily continued to empty mythos of all religious and metaphysical value. Contrasted both with logos and, later, with historia, mythos came in the end to denote "what cannot really exist." On its side, Judaeo-Christianity put the stamp of "falsehood" and "illusion" on whatever was not justified or validated by the two Testaments.
"A note about this book, January 9, 2003
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
Context: P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What’s more, they’ve done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever.
Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it’s hard to figure out how people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and whatnot. It’s your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my stock-in-trade.
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/house-of-sand-and-fog-2003 of House of Sand and Fog (26 December 2003)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. … "House of Sand and Fog" relates not a plot with its contrived ups and downs but a story. A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave.
To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of House of Sand and Fog, we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires.
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: There are books that have devastated continents, destroyed thousands. What war hasn’t been a war of fiction? All the religious wars certainly, or the fiction of communism versus the fiction of capitalism – ideas, fictions, shit that people make. They have made a vast impression on the real world. It is the real world. Are thoughts not real? I believe it was Wittgenstein who said a thought is a real event in space and time. I don’t quite agree about the space and time bit, Ludwig, but certainly a real event. It’s only science that cannot consider thought as a real event, and science is not reality. It’s a map of reality, and not a very good one. It’s good, it’s useful, but it has its limits. We have to realise that the map has its edges. One thing that is past the edge is any personal experience. That is why magic is a broader map to me, it includes science. It’s the kind of map we need if we are to survive psychologically in the age that is to come, whatever that is. We need a bigger map because the old one is based on an old universe where not many of us live anymore. We have to understand what we are dealing with here because it is dangerous. It kills people. Art kills.
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?
Interview with Weird Tales (24 May 2007) http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2007/05/24/george-rr-martin-on-magic-vs-science/
Context: I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep. I know there are elements in the field, particularly in science fiction, who feel that the differences are very profound, but I do not agree with that analysis. I think for me it is a matter of the furnishings. An elf or an alien may in some ways fulfill the same function, as a literary trope. It’s almost a matter of flavor. The ice cream can be chocolate or it can be strawberry, but it’s still ice cream. The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.
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.
