Roger Heath > Roger's Quotes

“Would we stand on faraway mountains, casually observing the ravaging of our Land, the destruction of our peoples, our loved ones destroyed before our eyes?" Naga's eyes blazed with anger. “What then? We would be left standing there on our grand mountain, tears streaming down our faces, asking how could this happen? What could I have done? Many useless questions asked by those who do not take part, who do not put themselves in the stream of history. Bystanders hoping that others will guide their future for them.”
― Roger P. Heath, Warriors of the Continuum Part One: Arrival

“Genre, a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, has been degraded into a disguise for mere value-judgement. The various “genres” are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers. lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands

“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

“The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin