Jack Williamson Quotes

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 wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?”
“Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.”
“No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”

Getting back at last to our initial question: Will academe kill SF? I don’t think so…
I do suspect that the critics are luring a few promising writers into the formless indulgence and the willful obscurity that has destroyed the popularity of modern poetry.

Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Science fiction, as I like to define it, is fiction based on the imagined exploration of scientific possibility. The distinction from fantasy—or from other sorts of fantasy—lies in the word possibility.

“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.”
The dark man smiled.
“For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”

“Magic.” He shot photos and shook his head. “Pure magic, till we learn enough to understand it.”

Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow.

“That’s a cynical viewpoint,” Horn said slowly.
“I’m an old man. I can afford no longer the luxury of ideals. If I am to achieve results recognizable within my few remaining years, I must be practical.”

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.

“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.”

Quietly she said: “I know I’m not insane.”
So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics.