Lucía’s Reviews > Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection > Status Update

A literalist deprives himself of the best part of art.

The plotless story is rather like free verse, or abstract art, or atonal music. Something is given up that most people imagine to be inseparable from the art form, but which, if done well (…), transcends the form and gives enormous satisfaction to those who can follow the writer into the more rarefied realms of the art.

a plot is not a story, any more than a skeleton is a living animal. It’s simply a guide to the writer, in the same way that a skeleton is a guide to a paleontologist as to what a long-extinct animal must have looked like.

The essence of a story is the struggle of one thing against another: a living thing against the impersonal universe; a living thing against another living thing; one aspect of a living thing against another aspect of himself.

there are the falsities of memory, which cast a delicious haze over the past, eliminating the annoyances and frustrations and magnifying the joys. Add to that the falsities of history which inevitably produce a greater emphasis on heroism, on dogged determination, on civic virtue, while overlooking squalor, corruption, and injustice.

The creation of robots was looked upon as the prime example of the overweening arrogance of humanity, of its attempt to take on, through misdirected science, the mantle of the divine.

In 1752, the French satirist Voltaire wrote Micromegas, in which visitors from Saturn and Sirius observe the Earth, but this cannot be taken literally. The visitors are merely Voltaire’s device for having Earth viewed with apparent objectivity from without in order to have its follies and contradictions made plain.

Such things as printing, the magnetic compass, and (most of all) gunpowder, leaked through westward from China, and these things—for some reason not exploited by the technologically more advanced Chinese—were put to amazing use by Europeans.

People always love themselves best. But in a world so interconnected that harm to one is harm to all, the best way of loving one’s self, is to love everyone else too.