Speculative Fiction Quotes

Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all. ~ Laura Resnick

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury - a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference. ~ Bruce Bawer

People won't change until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain changing brings. ~ Just B. Jordan

Soon we were downloading ourselves
into laptops, phones or pads, freer
than we had hoped,

floating centrifugally across the Internet
to swim alongside forgotten
selfies, spam emails and porn ~ Cyril Wong

Quote from "Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth":
"The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you'd never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings". ~ Alexandar Tomov

I no longer trusted the sun. I kept half an eye on it, night and day. I told myself that the sun would not go full rogue on us and send a pulse to suck our atmosphere away, but I had a hard time believing it.... ~ Brenda Marie Smith

Hmph. Even the animals deserted me.
I'd have deserted me, too, a different inner voice inserted dryly. The way I
banged around in here wanting to kill something - anything - if only it would bring Aislinn back to me. Fionn understood at a level beyond reckoning that if he ever laid eyes on Travis again, the Hunter would be dead before he saw what hit him. ~ Ann Gimpel

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft. ~ Jeffrey Panzer

Seriously man, what are you waiting for? Get in there - or I will. - Marek Montvene ~ J.C. Morrows

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. ~ Haruki Murakami

Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. - Erin O'Riordan, ~ Tim Lieder

All because I fell in love with a madman. ~ Carrie Butler

The whole world's a ghost factory. We all fade like the paint on these buildings, sometimes from too much sun, sometimes from too little. We blur and blend to the murky shades left behind when something vivid dies. ~ Will Ludwigsen

The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it - but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout. ~ Orson Scott Card

There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases: What if . . . ? If only . . . If this goes on ~ Ray Bradbury

Of all the Winter Service Industries, the Winter Consul was the most dangerous. Few who joined expected to last out the decade, yet recruitment was never much of a problem. You didn't find the job, they said, it found you. No-one ever who entered the Winter voluntarily wasn't trying to leave something behind. ~ Jasper Fforde

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you. ~ A. Merc Rustad

My hopes for pie died on the sidewalk. There went my grin. ~ Carrie Butler

My writing objective is to remove the stage and sing, dance, laugh and cry with the audience as one spirit. ~ Cathie Wright-Lewis

Henry rubbed his balding head and yawned. "Why do I think this is worth the risk?…Because I think Betty knew this would one day happen...One time she even said she believed our own government would conspire with other nations to exterminate God's people. ~ T.C. Avey

He shook his head again. "I'm afraid I don't feel much of anything these days. Especially not hope. I have no time or energy to waste on false wishes and dreams that won't come true."

"Hope isn't about ignorant wishing." She surprised even herself with her
defensive backlash. "Hope is about believing - believing there are better
things in store for us if we just wait for them. It's about understanding we're not left completely on our own here, regardless of the way things appear."

Lamont snorted. "That ain't much for a body to go on."

"Perhaps not, but I reckon it's enough. Sometimes it's gotta be, anyhow.
Without hope, what would drive one onward?"

He was silent for a long moment before he looked up and met her eyes.
His own eyes displayed no emotion when he answered in a weary, grim
tone, "Fear." He took a drink and fell silent again as she quietly scrutinized him, attempting to discern in his haggard face the thoughts behind what he had said. ~ Josh Strnad

Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person? ~ Laura Van Den Berg

To my surprise, the sensation of query filled my stomach, spreading through to every corner. This was followed by each point of query ending at the same answer. Device Nineteen had responded to the question by coming to the conclusion that oblivion was the end of every path.
Great. My roommate's an emo.>
My stomach reviewed the comment and rumbled queries to various parts of the diamond, but most were returned unanswered because the required systems were not yet online. ~ J. Cameron McClain

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you. ~ Jennifer Weiner

Closed head trauma is about as much fun as nude paintballing. ~ D.C. Farmer

I've read science fiction and fantasy all my life – though when you're a child, they just call that "books." The first book I ever read on my own was The Neverending Story. I studied classics at university, and in ancient literature, monsters, witches, magic, curses, and impossible machines aren't genre, they're just Tuesday afternoon. I had no idea that I was writing fantasy at first, because I was so saturated in Greek literature that it never occurred to me that my talking animals and sentient mazes were anything but realism. Our instinct toward folklore and magical stories, parables and imagining the future, are as much a part of the human experiences as divorce, grief, falling in love, politics, or raising children. I've always read fantastic literature, because it's always seemed truest to me. It makes the metaphorical literal and is all the more powerful for that immediacy and directness. I love genre fiction for the infinite expanse of stories it can tell – and it's been my constant companion since I was a very small child. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them. ~ Orson Scott Card

I shake my head and rub the bridge of my nose. "There's a whole lot more at stake here than just my happiness, so I'll let the doctors do whatever tests they want and answer any questions they have. But after that we save the world. And then we move on, okay? ~ Kara Swanson

When do things change entirely you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible? It is possible now. You are built to open your fists and show me your palms and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You are built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry and you are a child of my family and my family was made by the world. Here we stand in the dark now and I am old and you are holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We are looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn't be able to parse them. Now look at your own hand and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happens when you clinch your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight. ~ Victor LaValle

Funny, they made this new genre called Speculative Fiction, I thought all fiction had always been speculative. ~ Teri Louise Kelly

Reading about Bordertown was the first time I saw people like me in speculative fiction. Messed-up kids, making messsed-up choices. I couldn't be a magician's apprentice or a pig keeper who might or might not be a king's son or a princess with a prophecy hanging over my head. But I could, maybe, somehow, be part of a community of artists who loved magic. ~ Holly Black

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of "science fiction writers", who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants. ~ Orson Scott Card

Speculative Encounters New Stories from the Slipstream by C.L. Nichols Speculative Encounters: New Stories from the Slipstream
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I hope you enjoy reading these Speculative Stories from the Slipstream as much as I enjoyed creating them.
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The slipstream combines science fiction, fantasy and horror then

plants the resulting blend into the potting soil of mainstream

fiction. The 17 speculative stories cross the boundaries of genre.

Is a lineman really transported to an alternate reality after a lightning strike or is he hallucinating?

When vampires steal a man's wife, he follows to seek revenge with the assistance of a female vampire who offers him eternity.

Driving on a lonely country road at night, a man in a pickup sees a woman's bloody arm reach out from the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop road.

In the aftermath of a comet's disintegration in Earth's atmosphere, survivors must adapt – and was that an actual comet that exploded?
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eam
SPECULATIVE ENCOUNTERS: New Stories from the Slipstream

Speculative fiction is comprised of three related genres: science fiction, fantasy and horror. The slipstream intermingles these genres then plants imagination's resulting seeds i ~ C.L. Nichols

It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath ~ Cynthia Willerth

Hades cracked his knuckles on each hand, and the noise was like gunpowder caps exploding in the silence. "First dish duty," he mumbled to himself, "now possessed cowboys. This just isn't my night. ~ Josh Strnad

Speculative fiction both requires and rewards an open mind. ~ Steven Poore

Speculative fiction is where my heart lies. It's what I read growing up, and it's what I read as an adult. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied."
"By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy.
"No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment. ~ Daniel O'Malley

Throughout my life as I've sought to become a published writer of speculative fiction, my strongest detractors and discouragers have been other African Americans. These were people who had, like generations before them, bought into the mythology of racism: black people don't read. Black people can't write. Black people have no talents other than singing and dancing and sports and crime. No one wants to read about black people, so don't write about them. No one wants to write about black people, which is why you never see a black protagonist. Even if you self-publish, black people won't support you. And if you aim for traditional publication, no one who matters - that is, white people - will buy your work.

(A corollary of all this: there is only black and white. Nothing else matters.)

Having swallowed these ideas, people regurgitated them at me at nearly every turn. And for a time, I swallowed them, too. As a black woman, I believed I wasn't supposed to be a writer. Simultaneously I believed I was supposed to write about black people - and only black people. And only within a strictly limited set of topics deemed relevant to black people, because only black people would ever read anything I'd written. Took me years after I started writing to create a protagonist who looked like me. And then once I started doing so, it took me years to write a protagonist who was something different. ~ N.K. Jemisin

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point. ~ Rick Yancey

It's nice to be nice. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[T]he new weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary 'seriousness.' This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes suggested by folks who overemphasize the entertainment function of speculative fiction; it's about recognition of the vast possibilities within the field. ~ Darja Malcolm-Clarke

An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe. ~ Kelly Steed

The days pass," he said. "Yet ahead of me I see no less than there were before. ~ Amanda G. Stevens

In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction. ~ Josh Malerman

Matt shrugged. It was a good shrug, too. All it was missing was a beret, a stripy shirt and a Gauloise cigarette. ~ D.C. Farmer

Better to live life not expecting anything from anyone. That way you'll never be upset when they let you down - Will ~ Rehan Khan

Does it make you brave to stick your hand in a bear's mouth? Would you do it again just because you didn't die? ~ Robert Jordan

Like seduction, the Priestess took poisoning to an art form. ~ Karen Azinger

These are not red or blue issues - they are the human rights issues of our generation. We are here begging for our lives. If today's political officeholders cannot accomplish real change on guns and gun issues, we will vote together on these issues in the next election and elect their successors . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

Everything in this world happens with a purpose. You are born in this world with a purpose, you are chosen by purpose. ~ Udai Yadla

Not having any drink about ain't the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body's perspective. ~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I try to walk around without being noticed but I can't help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I'm with Holly and we're both tall and arrogant. ~ Jo Treggiari

Straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist behaving as if it were not true. ~ Michael Crichton

I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction. ~ Rick Bass

I won't compromise or apologize for something I didn't do. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The Booker thing was a catalyst for me in a bizarre way. It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself. I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s, as substitutes for experience. ~ Neil Cross

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn't heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes. ~ Jeremy Tiang

Who cares if they're not normal? Neither am I. ~ Caroline Frechette

I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit. ~ Jesse Lauriston Livermore

At one point in time, I had thought that my writing was a product of my circumstances. ~ Naveed Qazi

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. ~ George Steiner

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written. ~ Edward Abbey

Women come more easily to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. ~ Orna Ross

Life rushes when we're weak and drags when we're ready, always at odds with what we need and when. ~ Halo Scot

A brusque whisper coaxed Phillip from slumber. Someone had called his name. The cot squeaked as he sat up and squinted at a featureless silhouette. "Who is it?"
"Rise. Quick. Bring your medicine maker." The ragged voice belonged to True Seeker.
Tasked with keeping a watchful eye on Milly, the young man would come to Phillip at this hour for only one reason. He swung his legs to the ground. With one foot going into his trousers, he took a wide step across the narrow barracks and jostled Buck's shoulder.
His friend was on his feet and half-dressed before Phillip left the building, alarm urging his feet to a gallop. No one need tell him which direction to go. He buckled his sword belt as he went. The scabbard slapped his leg with each footfall, bringing to mind a similar night not long enough ago. His stride lengthened.
This time, he would run Collins clean through. ~ April W. Gardner

Next to the first Henry and Meg, Henry had written, "Promise?"
Well, that genie's out of the bottle and there's no stuffing her back in. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

How different this world to the one about which I used to read, and in which I used to live! This is one peopled by demons, phantoms, vampires, ghouls, boggarts, and nixies. Names of things of which I knew nothing are now so familiar that the creatures themselves appear to have real existence. The Arabian Nights are not more fantastic than our gospels; and Lempriere would have found ours a more marvelous world to catalog than the classical mythical to which he devoted his learning. Ours is a world of luprachaun and clurichaune, deev and cloolie, and through the maze of mystery I have to thread my painful way, now learning how to distinguish oufe from pooka, and nis from pixy; study long screeds upon the doings of effreets and dwergers, or decipher the dwaul of delirious monks who have made homunculi from refuse. Waking or sleeping, the image of some uncouth form is always present to me. What would I not give for a volume by the once despised 'A. L. O. E' or prosy Emma Worboise? Talk of the troubles of Winifred Bertram or Jane Eyre, what are they to mine? Talented authoresses do not seem to know that however terrible it may be to have as a neighbour a mad woman in a tower, it is much worse to have to live in a kitchen with a crocodile. This elementary fact has escaped the notice of writers of fiction; the re-statement of it has induced me to reconsider my decision as to the most longed-for book; my choice now is the Swiss Family Robinson. In it I have no doubt I should find ho ~ Wirt Gerrare

Getting shot wasn't an issue of skill; it was an issue of chance. And Justice had a bullet-sized issue of chance lodged in her shoulder. ~ Ashley Nikole

Horeb bent over me and ran his hand down my neck, not stopping when his fingers reached my chest.
I jerked backward. "What are you doing?"
His eyes were black and intense. "A little taste before the wedding, Jayden? ~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels - including short stories under the head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

One day he gave me a handful of sky when he saw me gazing up at the clouds, just to see me smile. I put it in my pocket. ~ Mary E. Pearson

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss. ~ Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir Of A Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction. ~ Joe Haldeman

Siddhartha embarked on a mission that human civilization has been on since its inception – How to overcome pain and suffering in human life. Siddhartha was perhaps the first scientist on the planet who wanted to address pain and suffering at their roots. While every other thinker from every other religious traditions speculated on the goals of life and afterlife, such speculative queries were nonsensical for Siddhartha for in the mold of a true scientist, he saw no evidential basis for them. Siddhartha didn't even query what is pain, and where does it come from. He directed his query on how can pain and suffering be removed, an enquiry no speculative philosopher had undertaken before. ~ Ajit Kumar Jha

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable. - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993 ~ Tony Hillerman

He pulled me toward him, and all I could do was stand there with arms at my sides and head against his chest. Broken, I feared even the slightest movement would cause pieces of me to snap off and fall to the gritty pavement. ~ Jodi LaPalm

There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme which baffled the lazy reader, who won't be bothered itemizing the details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details. ~ Raymond Chandler

You are the author of your life. So please don't let anyone including yourself make you think otherwise. If you feel like you don't like how your story goes, just write it differently. You have the tools, the courage, the power…you have it all! ~ Iva Kenaz

Apparently, faith in life is one thing and faith in literature is another. ~ Gerald Weaver