Religious Science Fiction Quotes

To write good religious science fiction, or indeed good religious fiction of any kind, is a challenge but one that it would be worthwhile trying to meet. It seems a pity the field has been apparently abandoned to pernicious rubbish like 'The Da Vinci Code', though this seems already, mercifully, to have faded away. In this, as in other areas, we could do with another C. S. Lewis to re-state the principles of Christianity in terms to stir the imagination. ~ Hal G.P. Colebatch

There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard? ~ Robert J. Sawyer

Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[ ... ]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards "Them" (i.e., anyone who is not one of "Us") is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview. ~ Zeena Schreck

I'm a storyteller, and there's some genres I like. I don't think I'm ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre. ~ Spike Lee

They're only askin' you to do one thing. From what Rogue says, you ain't exactly reluctant."
"F**k myself into a coma. Sure, I can do that. Then what?"
"Uh, wait an hour? ~ Michelle O'Leary

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.' ~ Jane Lindskold

I'm not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun. ~ Sarah Sutton

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn't possible, & if it was the results wouldn't be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder's victim, & makes us very afraid. ~ M. John Harrison

When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn't even a name for it. What those writers don't know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn't make for good characterisation. It's incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous.

I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that's why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you're all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing i ~ Mark Samuels

Everyone will be tracked, cradle to grave, with no possibility of escape. ~ Dave Eggers

A dark-haired woman with old eyes and young cleavage finally leaned her bosom toward him. "I'm sorry, sir, but I don't think I caught your position in the Sol business affairs."
Consort. Mica could have easily named him her personal guard. Her secretary. Even her research assistant. Well, two could play.
He bowed his head slightly, happy to oblige. "I see to the sexual needs of Mica Sol, firstborn and heir to the Sol corp. ~ Erin Kellison

This one sank deep into her marrow and made her heart soar like the shuttles piercing the stratosphere. ~ Katherine McIntyre

One thing I can guarantee, is that the world will never change itself because of our weaknesses. In fact, it has ways of actually becoming more dangerous when we approach it with a bad attitude. ~ J.Z. Colby

You know, the way I feel, if I read a science fiction book by a new writer which is a lot better than what I do, instead of going on a bummer right away and saying, "Oh Christ, I'm obsolete, I'm outdated, I've lost it." I have this tremendous sense of joy. I don't have to write all the great goddamn science fiction in the world. Somebody else is going to carry this torch. It's such a relief to sit with my feet up on the wall and to know that if I never wrote another book science fiction is going ahead. ~ Philip K. Dick

Someday, you're going to have to trust the people who love you. If you understand nothing else, understand this. People who love you--people like me--are actually here to help you through life, not complicate it. ~ Heidi Tankersley

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way. ~ Andy Weir

There was a period that black film had no chance of making it in Hollywood. So, people just made the made the statements that they wanted to make. Whether it was a science fiction film or whatever, b/c they were just making movie for themselves. Then there was a period where people were creating projects as their Hollywood audition 'pieces'. I feel that today we are moving back to the era where we all have our own voices. ~ Reginald Hudlin

No status change, we hold our fire. ~ Just Josh

One is almost tempted to say ... at last I can almost see a bond. But that will never be, for a bond does not really exist at all: it is a most convenient fiction which, as we have seen, is convenient both to experimental and theoretical chemists. ~ Charles Coulson

In some sense, we're all cavemen - we can't imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality - that's actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts ... or Rubinstein's monsters ... or is that Wallenstein?"
"Frankenstein. ~ Arkady Strugatsky

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~ Clarence Darrow

Science fiction doesn't try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present ... We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different ~ Samuel R. Delany

I just verbalise a possible outcome... I just like to see how far I can go... ~ Trevor Alan Foris

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters. ~ Mark Twain

Life gives only the canvas, but it is you, who chooses the colors. ~ Alexandr Iscenco

Contrary to secularist myth, science in practice is innately and irrepressibly religious: it serves either God or idolatry. But one of the features of idolatry is deceit. In this case, idolatry conceals from itself that it is idolatry. ~ Vern Sheridan Poythress

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true. ~ Carl Sagan

My mother fed my love of demons, science fiction, and paranormal. She was a devout horror movie fan who kept me up until the wee hours to watch 'Outer Limits,' 'Night Gallery,' 'Twilight Zone,' and 'Star Trek.' We lived to watch those reruns. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The truth, however, is that the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. ~ Sam Harris

Haydn snorts. "Only gullible, lovesick fools spout that mushy crap." Thank the stars that his tone is teasing, because I can sense Logan's patience waning.
"When you find the right girl, I'm so going to make you eat your words. And I'm going to thoroughly enjoy rubbing your nose in it. ~ Siobhan Davis

What, then, is the hallmark of science? Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commit­ment, that it is a religious conversion? Tom Kuhn, a distinguished Amer­ican philosopher of science, arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper's falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, then there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinc­tion between scientific progress and intellectual decay, there is no objec­tive standard of honesty. But what criteria can he then offer to demarcate scientific progress from intellectual degeneration? ~ Imre Lakatos

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole. ~ Robert Sheckley

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored. ~ Paul Di Filippo

When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did. ~ Ted Chiang

Connor had become a doctor just two days ago - along with all of his friends. They were hand-selected at just three years old to undergo intensive medical training as part of a controversial experiment, called Kid Docs. In the past few years, the Kid Docs program had produced some of the best doctors in the entire country, if not the world. They had some of the lowest complication rates and the highest success rates, and they had developed innovative new procedures that saved lives that were previously unsalvageable. Connor hoped that he would be among the best doctors in the world someday. But right now, he was focused on only a single thing: saving this one man's life. ~ J.W. Lynne

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space. ~ Charles Stross

In AR, a falling tree makes no sound unless there is a witness to behold the event. Otherwise, it is only a changing pattern in a complex data-stream. ~ Mark Cantrell

Space is infinite. To the mind that means freedom, liberation.' So wrote Arisko, our greatest turkle philosopher, in his most famous work, 'Thoughts In A Bathtub'," said Dottia, dreamily, in an inspired state. ~ Philip Dodd

We do not stop. You all took the oath to come here. Hard work lies before us in breeding our new community. - Adrian ~ Donna Galanti

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the 'future,' on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I searched my mind for the right visualization. I knew it had to start with what I put in my head. That is where all my accomplishments are formed. ~ Tina M. Randolph

Look in Kego's defense he was only Nine and a half when he took command of the ship and she had been put way off course by her captain and you lot would all be dead if it wasn't for him.
Jenny Smith In The Navigator by Steve Merrick ~ Steve Merrick

Alexis, please mind your mouth. Cursing in Russian is still cursing. ~ G.S. Jennsen

The whole Rebellion was a highly illegal action bordering on treason. When the rules don´t work, you break them. ~ Timothy Zhan

I suppose it's impossible to say that they will not invent anything else, because they might," said Zubria. "And, of course, if one thought of something that they might invent, one would have thought of it oneself, therefore one would be the inventor of what one thought of, and they would not be, which would make one an inventor, like them. ~ Philip Dodd

If you didn't have your guns, you still had your mouth. Of course, you had to be careful how you fired that off. ~ Dean F. Wilson

Expect an army of Vigil drones, nearly as a many Praesidis guards, a Machim ground detachment of super-soldiers and at least one Inquisitor. Oh, and security barriers everywhere. Possibly some of those mechs we met on Helix Retention, too. You Humans have kicked off a shitstorm of epic proportions."

Alex spread her arms wide in an exagerrated shrug. "It's one of our best skills. ~ G.S. Jennsen

The Magical Negro rested his red cane on his shoulder and leisurely strolled into the forest to see if he could find him some hobbits, castles, dragons, princesses, and all that other shit. ~ Nnedi Okorafor