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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Try to put aside your preconceptions. Don’t be disappointed when you discover, as you will, that I am not Harlan Ellison or Isaac Asimov. Harlan and Isaac—as they would be the first to admit—are not me, either.
greatness remains greatness even when stripped of power)
Fantasy is a pagan empire; Horror’s a Christian kingdom, embracing Hell.
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
These four books, which make up what is called The Book of the New Sun, are laid in a decadent society in Earth’s far future; and I had modeled this society on the Byzantine Empire.
I had an argument with David Hartwell over this last bit. David felt that I should add one more paragraph saying, Okay, Severian went to the universe next door and borrowed the white hole and fixed the sun and everybody lived happily every after.
It has been wisely said that the cost of living keeps going up because we can’t live without what our parents could.
Here in two flat sentences are the best things I can say about our field on American television: Dr. Who is sometimes aired. Sometimes Battlestar Galactica is not.
The original Battlestar Galactica, of course.
“Perhaps someone should point out that this god’s name meant all in everyday Greek. That is to say, the word-form is pas in the masculine nominative singular, pasa in the feminine, and pan in the neuter, strong evidence that ‘Pan’ once designated the Supreme Being. Faithfully, Gene Wolfe.”
That science fiction seems to me to be chrome-plated fantasy, that folklore seems to me fantasy in which the author is more or less contemporary but unknown? That just as magic realism is fantasy by a Spanish-speaking author, so myth is fantasy composed long ago by an author who spoke Greek? That legend is fantasy that is old or is thought to be?
