Science Fiction Quotes

“The presence of religion in science fiction is hardly surprising given its tendency to question limits and boundaries, and what could be more challenging than the limitation of mortality itself?”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“The science fiction magazine has played a unique role in the development of this fiction, functioning partly as a medium for publication and partly as a forum for ongoing debate about the nature of this fiction. SF pieces were being published in a range of popular magazines by the 1890s, but the first SF-dedicated periodical was Amazing Stories, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. The opening issue identified a tradition by publishing tales by Poe, Verne, and Wells, who Gernsback situated within what he was now calling ‘scientifiction’, tales in which ‘a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“The urge to impose a single classification on SF ignores the generic hybridity of many novels: incorporation of the Gothic in The Island of Dr Moreau, of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Forbidden Planet, and so on. The rise of film coincides with the emergence of science fiction. The relation between SF fiction and film has included an ongoing fascination with spectacle and extraordinary special effects like those pioneered in Georges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904).”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“One of the most recurrent themes in science fiction is its examination of humanity’s relation to its own material constructions, sometimes to celebrate progress, sometimes in a more negative spirit of what Isaac Asimov has repeatedly described as technophobia, through fictions articulating fears of human displacement.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“Language The clichéd image of an alien emerging from a flying saucer and declaring ‘Take me to your leader’ highlights one problem in alien narratives. As soon as aliens speak, their otherness becomes compromised, because we associate language with a way of life and view it as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. One way out of this impasse in early SF was to use the convenience of an instant translation device.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“During the period between the wars, the term ‘alien’ became attached more and more to extraterrestrial beings, but we should remember that it had earlier roots in 19th-century race theory and politics. Hostility to aliens was institutionalized in the USA by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and Anarchist Exclusion Act (1901). In this same period, quasi-humans on Mars – the favourite possibility at the turn of the 19th century – tended to be described in terms consistent with the racial hierarchy of the period. In Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880), short humans are discovered on Mars who have an Aryan appearance like Swedes or Germans. And Gustavus W. Pope, in his Journey to Mars (1894), conveniently colour-codes his own Martians into red, yellow, and blue races.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“Science fiction constantly interrogates the limits of identity and the nature of difference. The latter is frequently described through a quasi-allegorical displacement of the alien on to other countries and planets, following a strategy of encounter whereby readers are encouraged to re-examine their self-conceptions as a result of confrontation with the Other, with beings whose culture is rarely explored in its own right, but rather to highlight the markers of difference.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“An important revision of the traditional image of the spaceship was made in Anne McCaffrey’s Helva stories, beginning in 1961 with The Ship Who Sang. This series is set in a future when severely disabled children are given the chance to become starships by becoming enclosed in a metal shell connected directly to their brain. This is an enabling procedure involving ‘schooling’ (not programming) and complex neural and sensory connections being constructed through the titanium shell. In this respect, the ‘shell-people’ represent an early form of cyborg, and McCaffrey’s narrative replaces central technological control with the individual investigations and self-modifications by Helva herself in devising a means of singing.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

“The first was a pair of linked stories by Philip Francis Nowlan from 1928–9 in which he introduced the character of Anthony Rogers, soon renamed Buck for the comic strip which followed. The composite volume Armageddon 2419 AD describes how our hero falls asleep at a point when the USA is the most powerful nation in the world and wakes in the 25th century to find his country in ruins, ruled by the ruthless Han. Nowlan’s tale is essentially a Yellow Peril story with futuristic weapons added. What follows is a struggle to restore freedom to the USA and the rest of the world, and to defeat once and for all ‘that monstrosity among the races of men’, the Chinese.”
― David Seed, Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction