sci-fi

I don't know if you've ever been covered head to toe in prickle bush, but let me tell you, it's not a pleasant experience, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

Kate stops grinding the knife and begins to pass it over the length of the stone. Turning her wrist, she pulls the blade, swiping one side after the other, honing it to a fine edge. She wipes it dry with an old cloth and picks up a long piece of dark leather. One end of the strop she ties to the knob on the back of her chair, then holds it taught with her left hand. She counts in her head as she passes the blade over the length of the leather, flipping it at the bottom and the top of each pass. When she gets to twenty, she releases her hold on the strop and looks closely at the knife blade. Even in the dim light of the room, it shines.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. And your last thought, as you stretch your arm until your fingers are inches from that lifeline, is how if you survive, you'll find a way to help fix what was broken, so you can say that yes, you want to be part of the world again.

Can the child who is Dell; be the outer emoodiment of man's quest to save himself? To cure himself?...Or, to "be" himself?

It's hard. Being 15, 16, 17. You get so angry. You want to do something with that anger. I guess try to find some other way to let it out. Don't kill people. Don't kill yourself. Let yourself grow up a little. Then you might start to think differently about things. You might get new opportunities to do something with your life that you never thought possible as a teenager." -- Thomas Harvey from the upcoming novel, "Nikki White: Polar Extremes" (Nikki, #3)

You__e not interested in her because by your definition she isn__ real. But your brain doesn__ know the difference. It__ all just chemicals firing and testosterone giving you a hard-on.

Max: Why do I get the feeling you__e played god and you don__ know what you__e created.Dr Hurstville: Hasn__ god done the same with us?

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

The lights were off so that his heads could avoid looking at each other because neither of them was currently a particular engaging sight, nor had they been since he had made the error of looking into his soul.It had indeed been an error.It had been late one night-- of course.It had been a difficult day-- of course.There had been soulful music playing on the ship's sound system-- of course.And he had, of course, been slightly drunk.In other words, all the usual conditions that bring on a bout of soul searching had applied, but it had, nevertheless, clearly been an error.

Where there is great love there is great harmony of thought.

To try is to invite uncertainty. Where confidence goes, success usually follows.

To try is to accept the possibility of failure. Simply do.

The sea in all its vastness is its own, real world. Man is nature's sci-fi.

...the magic was a tool, though a natural, mysterious tool. In its awareness of the magic, his human nature had desired to connect with it, to use it. The whisperings were the voice of his own awakening, not the seductive call of a dark power. Using it was not corruption, but a natural extension of his being. And he could control the manner in which he used it. He would.