Best 1974 quotes in «science fiction quotes» category

Power is an ill-tempered and treacherous mistress. She corrupts even the incorruptible. If you value your freedoms you will have to bind her and keep her from your lands and leaders, because she will seize their minds and seduce their consciences until they give in to her insatiable appetite.

Precisely how are we supposed to win a war if we're not allowed to, you know, actually shoot anyone? --From SCAPEGOATS: The Goat Protocols

Probablemente no haya en nuestra vida un instante más terrible que aquel en que uno descubre que su padre es un hombre... hecho de carne humana.

Quinn dropped her hand and avoided Thalcu’s eye. “I . . . I don’t want to kill you,” she said to the floor. “Not if I could save you.” The woman smiled gently at Quinn, her lips curling behind her oxygen mask. “I will not really die,” she said, drawing Quinn’s surprised gaze. She looked at Quinn contently a moment and went on, “Do you know how worlds are born? From the first breath of a star. We are made of starlight. We can not bear to look into the sun, into the thing that birthed us, anymore than we can bear to look upon our parents in the throes of passion. It is our point of origin, and to it, we all must return.

Quote from Frontiers: "Regardless of what happened, it was definitely going to be an exciting time for everyone, the day humanity first reached out to touch the stars.

Rachel Henson stood facing him, immaculate in her uniform and ready for duty as always. She looked as though she had spent her whole life preparing for this very moment - she always did.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

Ransolm gave her his most winning smile. It was, he knew, a good one, highly effective on most women and more than a few men. Although he was no womanizer, he understood very well how to be charming when necessary.

Reaching out, I grab his hand and intertwine my fingers with his. And I move into his space until we're not even an inch from each other. Laying my forehead on his chest, I take a deep breath and feel his whole body relax, as if tension is rolling off his body in waves. I was always the kid who loved the smell of gasoline. His free hand comes up, and his fingers slip through my hair before his hand settles between my shoulder blades. "Ben," I say into his shirt. "Janelle," he whispers back, and I can feel his mouth against my hair. I can feel him smile.

Raw, gentle, and easy, it mizzled out of the high air, a special elixir, tasting of spells and stars and air, carrying a peppery dust in it, and moving like a rare light sherry on his tongue. Rain.

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed—the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger.

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.

Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle science fiction.

Reality is highly overrated.

Reality is but several levels of consciousness that can be accepted or dismissed depending on what one perceives.

Red, orange and green geometric designs painted its body as well as the flimsy collar around its neck. The creature flicked its tail and blinked its deep-set eyes, apparently oblivious to their presence. "That's a yraglian lizard," Deven whispered. "We need to stay back. They smell really bad if you upset them. I mean, really, really bad." Dirck nodded, unsurprised that the first native creature he encountered on Cyraria represented it so well.

Red, orange and green geometric designs painted its body as well as the flimsy collar around its neck. The creature flicked its tail and blinked its deep-set eyes, apparently oblivious to their presence. "That's a yraglian lizards," Deven whispered. "We need to stay back. They smell really bad if you upset them. I mean, really, really bad." Dirck nodded, unsurprised that the first native creature he encountered on Cyraria represented it so well.

Regrets, it seems, are easy to realise when you're dying.

Reluctantly, we had already accepted every challenge at the moment we were born. And as long as we live, we have no right to give up. For we, or at least someone very similar to us, already died once, long ago in a faraway place.

Remember Ping-fa, Sun Tzu,’ Art of War—read between the lines: kick ass and take names later.” Mad Stargirl

Researchers still don’t know what’s involved in Shifting. Have you heard of dark matter?’ ‘I know the name but not what it is.’ ‘It’s something like another dimension all around us. We can’t see it or touch it, but there’s five times more of it than what we call our world. It isn’t made of atoms in the way that we are. It’s at the edge of our understanding of the universe. It’s like black holes – you can’t view them, but you know they’re there because of the way things act when they’re in close proximity to one. It’s the same with dark matter. We think teleportation involves a dimensional shift.’ Jackie (J M) Johnson, Starbirth Assignment Shifter

Resistance, however, is useless. (1939)

RIDE A WHITE SWAN" "Ride it on out like a bird in the skyway, Ride it on out like you were a bird, Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam, Ride it all out like you were a bird. Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old days Wear a tall hat and a Tattooed gown Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane, Wear your hair long,babe,you can't go wrong. Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead, Say a few spells and baby,there you go, Take a black cat and sit it on your shoulder, And in the morning you'll know all you know. Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old days Wear a tall hat and a Tattooed gown Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane, Wear your hair long, babe ,you can't go wrong. Da di di da, da di di da

Richard paused again. Bert hated that pause; he knew it all too well from his meetings with the town selectmen. Bureaucrats implemented such pauses when they were adjusting the truth or trying to decide how much of it the sheriff needed to know.

Risk the risks.

Right? I don’t know why I did it. Temporary insanity, maybe. Did you ever do something that makes absolutely no sense, but you couldn’t help yourself?

River Tam (Summer Glau): No power in the 'verse can stop me.

R K Narayan one of my best Indian novelist remains in Indians heart throughout their life" -Shreyas Krishna P S

Saji has had things done to people who crossed him or whom he has perceived as crossing him. Ugly things. These guys we're meeting? They think they're tough. They run book, own strip clubs, dabble in petty theft and probably sell dope for all I know and they're comfortable in that world, thinking they own it. That arrogance? That feeling that they can just push people around and do anything they want? It has left them with one foot in the grave and they don't even know it.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

Sad se možete, zapovjedniče, upitati kakve to veze ima s vašim pitanjem. Moj odgovor glasi: u povijesti ne postoji primjer da bi neka kultura najednom ušla u razdoblje anarhije i građanskih ratova. Uvijek je riječ o sporom razvoju; a prvi je korak bespoštedno preispitivanje svega što je nekad bilo sveto. Unutarnja izvjesnost prestane postojati i raspada se pod nemilosrdnim sondiranjem znanstvenog i analitičkog uma. Skeptik postaje najviši oblik postojanja.

Sat apart from the decay, an area of woodland, which shimmered in green. It offered a kind of radiance Namtilla had never seen, such a hostile paradox to the world she had grown up in. Memories were haunted by fear, but affected by the same mundane surroundings, as if someone with a single set of bricks and a monochrome vision had created it for them, and colour was something that only inhabited the imagination.

Saul's vitals were not human, but familiar: he never told me he was from another world: I never told him I was from his future.

Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.

Scent is like a kiss of time travel which transports one to an ancient memorable occasion.

Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by the others is ‘high fantasy’, sometimes called ‘Sword and Sorcery’. There is a lot of stylized sneering at ‘S and S’.

Science fiction is the art of telling stories about how technology and science might impact humanity during possible futures or other realities.

Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things, there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them, too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.

science fiction is not about the future but about the possibilities inherent in the present.

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.

Science fiction writers and thriller writers and traditional so-called ‘literary’ novelists are all novelists, and they finally have to be judged on how good they are, not on which category they belong in.

Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Science Fiction is a group of symptoms and not a disease,” so a medical student (failed) told me once. “It's like the old disease hydropsy that doctors treated for so long before discovering that it was only a collection of symptoms, sometimes for a heart disease, sometimes for a liver or kidney disease, or sometimes even for a septic throat.” Well, the symptoms for Science Fiction are a prowling avidity to search out and read certain occult texts; an uneasiness or excitement that permates the whole routine of life; it's the ‘itchy ears’, as mentioned in Scripture, seeking for ‘new things’. The symptoms are usually a falcon-like hunting or questing; a series of sudden tuneful encounters; a group of euphorias and buoyancies that cry in opposite directions to be hoarded like misers' treasures and simultaneously to be shared with fellow sufferers of the symptoms; feeling that the ‘World We Live In’ is somehow masked and needs to be unmasked. These and other symptoms indicate either a strange disease or diseases, or they indicate a perpetually new kind of health. Tracing the symptoms back to the ‘disease’ does indicate that the disease is multiple, that it has such names as Hard Science Fiction, Soft Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Non-Conforming Adventure Fiction. And sometimes it bears such non-consensus names as Biological Fiction, Ontological Fiction, Eschatological Fiction (did Teilhard, for instance, know that he was writing Eschatological Fiction?), Theological Fiction, or Psychological or Philosophical or Technological or Geological or Historical Fiction. These things and many others share the same complex of symptoms.

Science fiction is always about the time it’s written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction.

Science fiction stories are about the impact of technology and science on humanity in a possible future reality.

Scorching, desiccated air blasted Nika as she stepped off the transport and peeled layers of moist tissue off her throat as she inhaled. She pivoted, yanked her heavy tactical shirt up over her head and tossed it inside the transport. The material was designed to protect her from blows and glancing cuts and would be less than useless against a Rasu attack— —a scorpion-like creature sporting a tail six centimeters long scurried past her feet in the sand, and she promptly retrieved the shirt and pulled it back on with a groan. The planet had defenses of its own, and the Rasu weren’t the only threat here.

Science. They were all the science experiments of a maniacal government bent on controlling the universe.

Science fiction and fantasy, though they seem to be about the future or fictional worlds, are always at their core really about the problems and issues of today.

Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities.

Science fiction has no ceiling.