Science Fiction Literature Quotes

#1. There's always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature and then science-fiction televised shows or movies, partly because they have a different dynamic.

John Scalzi

#2. The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it's cool, it's fun, it's healthy, it's sexy, it's stylish. On the other hand it's terrifying, it's alienating, it's addictive, and it's scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.

Thomas Bangalter

#3. Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

Connie Willis

#4. Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy ... and on and on and on.

R.A. Salvatore

#5. Perhaps the god who had made the Cat People intended them as a joke. They had schools, but no education; politicians but no government; people, but no personal integrity; faces, but no concept of face. One had to admit that their god had gone a little too far with his little joke.

Lao She

#6. Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.

David Brin

#7. Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.

Ken Liu

#8. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

Robert Anton Wilson

#9. HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!

Arkady Strugatsky

#10. The truth is crazier than lies because lies are required to stick to possibilities - the truth isn't.

Caroline George

#11. The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

Aleksandar Hemon

#12. With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

Kingsley Amis

#13. Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'

David Gerrold

#14. Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Joan D. Vinge

#15. Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Anthony Burgess

#16. Pornography is one of the branches of literature - science fiction is another - aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation.

Susan Sontag

#17. Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

E. M. Forster

#18. [Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.

Isaac Asimov

#19. Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

J.G. Ballard

#20. That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.

Frederik Pohl

#21. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.

Charles Stross

#22. Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Walter Jon Williams

#23. Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

David Brin

#24. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Susan Sontag

#25. I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.

Lois Lowry

#26. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such

Georges Bataille

#27. Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut

#28. Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.

Katharine Kerr

#29. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

#30. When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

Nalo Hopkinson

#31. As they walked, it seemed almost every building had some similar contrivance as decoration, adorning the street in a cacophony of clangs, bangs and whirs. The street's surroundings danced with steam and smoke, the scent of oil and grease its perfume.

A.F. Stewart

#32. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed. I

Harlan Ellison

#33. My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

Frederik Pohl

#34. What we've done is make the categories of science fiction and fantasy larger, freer, and more inclusive than any other genre of contemporary literature. We have room for everybody, and we are extraordinarily open to genuine experimentation.

Orson Scott Card

#35. Science fiction is the very literature of change.

Frederik Pohl

#36. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.

R. Curtis Venture

#37. Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.

Tom Shippey

#38. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Frederick Lenz

#39. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

Gregory Benford

#40. Science fiction is the agent provocateur of literature.

Dana Stabenow

#41. Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.

Isaac Asimov

#42. Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

David Brin

#43. Science Fiction is a branch of children's literature.

Thomas M. Disch

#44. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.

Michael Dirda

#45. In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.

Steve Erickson

#46. It would be easier to separate salt from the seas than Edgar Allan Poe's influence from our literature.

Andrew Barger

#47. I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

J.G. Ballard

#48. Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good.

Mira Grant

#49. America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe.

Thomas M. Disch