Jack Williamson Quotes

Considering the uses of science fiction, I think it must first of all offer entertainment, before the the futurology or the social comment can matter. For most readers, entertainment means escape. Though a few young writers are scornful of the, creating good escape fiction is a high and admirable art. Even when the writer aims at something more, entertainment is basic. The bored reader is lost.

Accelerating change has become almost the first fact of life.

“I don’t see the necessity of this mummery—”
“Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”

“What’s wrong with him, Matal?” Wendre said dazedly. “He wants to kill us all.”
“Power,” Wu said somberly, stepping back from the car, “is a vision that drives men mad.”

“Whatever a woman is,” Wendre said, “she’s that second and a woman first.”

He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?

Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cluster. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now.
So it had let him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once it started, he never had a chance to turn back.

You have a right to be curious. And I have a right to refuse to satisfy it. You may credit it to your own charm or an old man’s whim, if you like. You are interesting, you know. Hired killers always are. Not admirable, but interesting.

Creation.…
It is its own nemesis. Success is temporary, and idolization will not make the ephemeral permanent. Decay is implicit in the birth of any organism.
An empire is an organism.

The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied.
Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty.
With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged.

SF still appeals to the young, as always, because so much of it is set in the futures in which they will be living.

Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension.

“I go where I wish,” Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff.
And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, “So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear.”
In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed.
Choice. Where had there been choice?

“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.”
He shook his head, with a sober emphasis.
“This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.”
His calm brown face smiled hopefully.
“Does that make you feel any better?”
“It does, doctor.”

“Sure, when something moves, somebody has pushed, but that isn’t good or bad in itself. It depends on the situation and the pusher.”
“You’re learning wisdom,” Sair said. “Only the circumstances determine good and evil. And only the future can say what the circumstances actually were.”
“Then there is no firm basis for acting at all,” Wendre objected. “What you do for the best of motives may be the worst thing to do.”
“Exactly,” Sair said dryly. “It is a commonplace that more harm is done by well-intentioned fools then by the most unscrupulous villains. A wise man learns not to judge. He may set himself certain standards, but he recognizes that they are only a personal pattern to guy his own conduct and that other standards have the same validity.”