Heredity or environment? I wondered wryly. We were all of us, to some degree, mad after his fashion. To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to… - Roger Zelazny

"Beware," she recited a personal beatitude, "those who hunger and thirst after justice, for we will be satisfied."
"And beware the meek," she continued, "for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth."

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don't want them to.

True epics of course are few and historically well spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of idea that, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, the most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than from theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered.