Hal Duncan Quotes

#1. - Come Inanna, enter, Neti said to her, and as Inanna entered the first gate, the sugurra, crown of the steppe, was taken from her head.
- What is this? asked Inanna
- Quiet, Inanna, she was told. The customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.

Hal Duncan

#2. I wanted to do justice to texts that are in verse in their original, so I tried to invest my version with a comparable poetic power; hence even more literary fireworks there.

Hal Duncan

#3. Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

Hal Duncan

#4. No, we're not prisoners of flesh, I think, bound in our skins, and only waiting for the final judgment that will send us into fire or light. We're fucking prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear and shame. We're fucking prisoners of sorrow, and it's time for our release.

Hal Duncan

#5. Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.

Hal Duncan

#6. So the question is ... You wanna be a Scruffian or not?

Hal Duncan

#7. The conflict between pacifism and socialism ultimately reflects a greater quandary of how one engages with such a system.

Hal Duncan

#8. Cause what do groanhuffs know? All's they've done is heard our tales and passed em along in a game of Chinese Whispers, getting em all mixed up, like.

Hal Duncan

#9. Prejudice validates itself as righteous abhorrence of the criminally deviant. So Christian homophobia is just a metonym of that abjection in general.

Hal Duncan

#10. All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

Hal Duncan

#11. Movies, novels, TV shows - these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we're turned away, sent to the ghetto.

Hal Duncan

#12. The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.

Hal Duncan

#13. For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.

Hal Duncan

#14. I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject.

Hal Duncan

#15. Find the truth and spread the lie.

Hal Duncan

#16. For many readers, writers, editors and agents ... pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck?

Hal Duncan

#17. AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?

Hal Duncan

#18. All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.

Hal Duncan

#19. I likes me some 'Shit Blows Up' fiction, don't get me wrong.

Hal Duncan

#20. Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Hal Duncan

#21. I kissed the boys and made them cry ... in ecstasy.

Hal Duncan

#22. See, you have the choice we didn't. You wanna think about it though, you do, before you decide to throw your lot in with us. Cause it's not just about living in society's stitches, you know, the bits in between, the squats and secret places. It's about being Fixed.

Hal Duncan

#23. So, fuck 'em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We're GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker's jackets.

Hal Duncan

#24. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map.

Hal Duncan

#25. She has to be written out of history and written into myth.

Hal Duncan

#26. Jack in and jerk off, kid! You too can save the world ... from those evil, bug-eyed commies from space!

Hal Duncan

#27. The quirky flavourings of the idiosyncratic ideologue ultimately drowned in the ketchup of redheaded twins and nipples that go spung.

Hal Duncan

#28. Homophobia's just one form of abjection, and wherever you have a marker of deviance - skin colour, gender, gender identity, disability - you get the same mechanisms of prejudice.

Hal Duncan

#29. Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.

Hal Duncan

#30. One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum.

Hal Duncan

#31. Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we're talking now, not factuality but possibility.

Hal Duncan

#32. Losing maturity in one's fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that's not always a bad thing.

Hal Duncan

#33. Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man's good character is marked by his impeccable attire.

Hal Duncan

#34. A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft.

Hal Duncan

#35. Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

Hal Duncan

#36. This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

Hal Duncan

#37. In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.

Hal Duncan

#38. Fuck, if only 'aesthetic idiom' didn't sound so damn poncy.

Hal Duncan

#39. Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.

Hal Duncan

#40. Soylent Brown? It ain't people, but it comes from them.

Hal Duncan

#41. The crescent sun is high, the moon low;
life is not for the faint-hearted;
so why the fuck should art be?

Hal Duncan

#42. But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird.

Hal Duncan

#43. Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes.

Hal Duncan

#44. Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.

Hal Duncan

#45. Brain out, sponge in' fiction.

Hal Duncan

#46. Hope is determination, you think. Hope is desperation. Hope is a yearning you can't deny. And hope is just plain old-fashioned insanity.

Hal Duncan

#47. Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets.

Hal Duncan

#48. In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn't matter if you're filthy. In theory anyway.

Hal Duncan

#49. So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.

Hal Duncan

#50. Science fiction long assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom).

Hal Duncan

#51. We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.

Hal Duncan

#52. You want a crime to torture yourself for, try cowardice. The only sin that ever mattered a shit is the shame that put us all here. Fuck, I didn't give you that power just so you could judge yourselves. I gave you the power so you could judge God.

Hal Duncan

#53. Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Hal Duncan

#54. It's the doors that make a prison, he says, not the walls. The doors you don't even try to open.

Hal Duncan

#55. I'm sort of exploring where pacifism and socialism come into conflict. How do you reconcile a passionate rejection of might and violence with an attitude of "nil paseran" - "none shall pass" - in the face of fascism?

Hal Duncan