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Speculative Fiction Quotes

Browse 126 quotes about Speculative Fiction.

Speculative Fiction Quotes

“The odds are ever in Katniss's favor: she is the primary character with whom audiences identify. This is not inherently problematic, as part of the work of literature is to provide mirrors, windows, and doors into other people's experiences. The problem occurs when contemporary literature and media for young people include characters of color who are supposed to provide someone for every reader or viewer to identify with--and yet at the same time construct protagonists who are the only characters worth rooting for. Although the initial authorial intent may have been noble, stories constructed in such a fashion have the pernicious effect of normalizing our existing social hierarchies--including hierarchies of race.”

Speculative FictionThe Hunger GamesRacialized MirrorsSocial Hierarchies
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“Helen dared to look up without being invited to do so. “I cannot thank you enough for your kindness, Lady Consort.” “Kindness had nothing to do with it. You have skills and training I need just now, and I intend to use you shamelessly, and expose you to greater danger.” “Get in line, Lady Consort,” Helen replied. “Danger-filled usury seems to be a holiday pastime in this city.” The Consort stopped pretending to do her needlework. “I could have you whipped for such insolence, girl.” “Before or after you use me.”

DespairSpeculative FictionLove TriangleGood Vs EvilPersonal IdentityReluctant HeroMystical RealmsSocietal RebellionDystopian UndertonesMixed Race Identity
Book:Stoneslayer: Book One Scandal
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“Well, without at least some optimism writing anything is impossible -- you have to believe that someone out there will be reading what you write. Even more so for science fiction for me -- we're thinking and writing about the future, so to a greater or lesser extent we're thinking that there will be a future to participate in, and that people will be there to tell us what we got right and what we got wrong. Even dystopian literature often trades in hope of some form -- people fighting against the dystopia, for example. There will always be specific counter-examples, but I think generally science fiction has optimism baked in. We believe in the future, even if there's a long slog between where we are now and where we will go.”

OptimismScience FictionWriters On WritingWriters QuotesFuture QuotesSpeculative Fiction
Author:John Scalzi
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“Every animal's perception of the world, constructed by its evolved sensory apparatus and nervous system to take best advantage of its environment, is subjective - there are no colors out there, as we perceive them, waiting for us. There is no sound - only waveforms. And perhaps the strangest fact of all: Outside our bodies, there is no pain. Pain is something we create.”

PainScienceFictionScience FictionSci FiScifiSpeculative FictionSpeculative Science Fiction
Book:The Mountain in the Sea
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“U-2200 is a heavily worn, approximately egg-shaped 1.07-meter-tall monolith of tenasserite limestone inhabited by Gua, a non-corporeal entity that claims to be the prehistoric Johorean god of forgetting how to ride a bicycle. [...] U-2200 claims to have dwelled within the stone since its carving, more than 5,000 years ago. Exactly what U-2200 did between that time and the invention of the first actual bicycle in the 19th century is a matter of some debate. Consensus among Organization academics is that U-2200 did nothing, and probably did not exist in its present form. U-2200, however, claims that the bicycle has been invented dozens of times by cultures in all parts of the globe over the course of the past 5,000 years, only for U-2200 to engulf, consume, and negate all human knowledge not only of the riding of bicycles but of the mechanism of the bicycle, before lapsing back into dormancy. It calls this “the Bicyclecycle.”

MythologySurrealDark HumorSpeculative FictionAbsurdismWorldbuildingUnreliable NarratorAncient ArtifactBureaucracy SatireSecret Organization
Book:There Is No Antimemetics Division
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“He shook his head again. “I’m afraid I don’t feel much of anything these days. Especially not hope. I have no time or energy to waste on false wishes and dreams that won’t come true.” “Hope isn’t about ignorant wishing.” She surprised even herself with her defensive backlash. “Hope is about believing—believing there are better things in store for us if we just wait for them. It’s about understanding we’re not left completely on our own here, regardless of the way things appear.” Lamont snorted. “That ain’t much for a body to go on.” “Perhaps not, but I reckon it’s enough. Sometimes it’s gotta be, anyhow. Without hope, what would drive one onward?” He was silent for a long moment before he looked up and met her eyes. His own eyes displayed no emotion when he answered in a weary, grim tone, “Fear.” He took a drink and fell silent again as she quietly scrutinized him, attempting to discern in his haggard face the thoughts behind what he had said.”

MythologyGreek MythologySpeculative Fiction
Book:Pantheon
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“The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.”

EarthStarsMusicMeditationMoonHarmonyFlyingMysticismParanormal Urban Fantasy RomanceSpeculative FictionSupernatural MysteryFantasy NovelsVisionary MetaphysicsMetaphysical FictionPostered Poetics By AberjhaniSighsDream VisionMetaphysical PoetsMusic Of The SpheresMetaphysical BookZped Music PlayerNebulaeParanormal CharactersBlack SkylarkFiction Character Danny BlueFlickering StarsMythopoeic FicitonNovels By Aberjhani
Book:Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player
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“Then she closed her eyes and said, almost involuntarily, “Kel Fulbreech just kissed me.” Jimex paused, just for a moment, in his wiping. “Oh,” he said, his voice milk-bland and mild. “I don’t believe Ellenex has medication for that.” Park felt a laugh bubble up in her chest, but stifled it sharply. How like an android to think of such a thing as needing a prescription—a cure. Maybe he was right.”

HumorKissingScience FictionSpeculative FictionAndroidsSfGrace ParkDeucalion
Author:Lena Nguyen
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“She finished cleaning him off and then held her baby boy up high to behold this new wonder in his full glory. The brilliant glimmers dancing upon the restive sea as his halo and the winged legions to announce and to extol his arrival and the eternal tide rhythmically whispering of deeds long foreseen. The light and the song and the abiding heart. Creation in its purest form. It was to this divine ensemble that Isa lifted her voice to give name to the precious enigma that she knew would elevate the harmony of all things to realms transcendent.”

BirthTranscendenceBeginningSpeculative Historical FictionBeginningsSpeculative FictionBirth QuotesGenre BendingAfrican FictionCross Genre
Book:The Subtle Cause
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“Did the Ancient Hainish postulate that continuous sexual capacity and organized social aggression, neither of which are attributes of any mammal but man, are cause and effect? Or, like Tumass Song Angot, did they consider war to be a purely masculine displacement-activity, a vast Rape, and therefore in their experiment eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femineity that is Raped? God knows.”

WarSexScience FictionGenderSexualityGender RolesSocial CommentarySpeculative FictionViolence In Society
Book:The Left Hand of Darkness
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“The dawn of a new era for mankind has arrived. It is now possible to communicate directly with the spirits of those departed from this world, and perhaps even entities of other natures as well. Not by means of the mysticism of seances or Ouija boards or crystal balls, but by technology. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…the spirit phone!”

FictionNovelHorrorSpeculative FictionHistorical FantasyThomas EdisonOccult FictionSupernatural Fiction
Book:The Spirit Phone
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“You think your life is unfurling in a certain way, and you let yourself grow happy about it, a smile rising at the slightest thing. A boy in short pants eating a pastelito makes you grin like a lunatic at the vision of your own hoped‐for children, their dark shiny heads rising, year by year, from the Cuban earth, your wife towering behind them, kind and wise. Then you find yourself in a midnight cemetery guarding your mustache from the covetous ghost of an American woman you once loved. Who wouldn’t laugh?”

UniqueGhostsHauntingLiterary FictionSurrealCubaMagical RealismCemeterySpeculative FictionCollection
Book:The Only Sound Is the Wind: Stories
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“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable. Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow. And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness. The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”

Science FictionPataphysicsSurrealismSpeculative FictionCognitive ScienceAuditoryWeird FictionSurrealisticOlfactorySensory ProcessingStimuliMole FliesPuppet Dictator
Book:Don't Forget to Breathe
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