Brian Aldiss Quotes

The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones.

My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to be achieved by present-day machines."Artificial Intelligence" — that makes it sound simple, but what you're really talking about is artificial consciousness, AC. And I don't think there's any way we can achieve artificial consciousness, at least until we've understood the sources of our own consciousness. I believe consciousness is a mind/body creation, literally interwoven with the body and the body's support systems. Well, you don't get that sort of thing with a robot.

There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked.

Frank's chromosome conquered everywhere. Peace was guaranteed.
By the end of another century's ruthless intermarriage, Russia and Asia were engulfed as thoroughly as Europe, and by the same loving methods. Billions of people: one consciousness.

The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Science Fiction had made itself a part of the general debate of our times. It has added to the literature of the world ; through its madness and freewheeling ingenuity , it has helped form the new pop music, through its raising of semi religious questions, it has become part of the underworld where drugs, mysticism, God-kicks, and sometimes even murder meet ; and lastly , it has become one of the most popular entertainment in its own rights, a wacky sort of fiction that grabs and engulfs anything new or old for its subject matter, turning it into a shining and often insubstantial wonder.

Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality. It was a sort of madness that had driven man from his humble sites on the edges of the woods into towns and cities, into arts and wars, into religious crusades, into martyrdom and prostitution, into dyspepsia and fasting, into love and hatred, into this present cul-de-sac; it had all come about in pursuit of symbols. In the beginning was the symbol, and darkness was over the face of the Earth.

Nor could she frame deeper words herself; human understandings trickled shallow these days. It was the way.

It is at night... that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull.

She strengthened her will by saying “It is the Way.

In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.

Synthetic life-forms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year.

Death, after all, had many shapes; everyone knew it: it was the way.