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Speculative Fiction Quotes

Browse 126 quotes about Speculative Fiction.

Speculative Fiction Quotes

“They come from miles around, my characters do, traveling the great distance from the fringes of my mind’s eye, some even making the long and arduous haul from my childhood, just to sit and talk. They do this whenever I’m alone.”

Science FictionShort StoriesAnthologySpeculative Fiction
Book:A Story Box Full Of Regret: The Collected Shortish Stories of Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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“People think--wrongly--that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different. What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present--taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It's cautionary.”

FutureScience FictionSci FiPresentSpeculative FictionPredictionRay BradburyFahrenheit 451Cautions
Author:Neil Gaiman
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“A newspaper article predicted that we would no longer see any mountain peaks, seas, or adult bodies that were whole in twenty years. We had grown accustomed to these horrifying speculations, the same way we read about faraway countries with long and foreign-sounding names wrecked by war, earthquakes, storms, and massacres. There would be a moment when we fell into wordless grief, but with the turn of a page, we would get inundated by job and real-estate listings and restaurant advertisements again. People weren’t indifferent; it was just that, for those of us who lived here, the future always felt so surreal.”

DystopianHong KongSpeculative FictionDystopian FictionAsian LiteraturePolitical FictionChinese Literature
Author:Hon Lai Chu
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“IN HIS PRESENCE, I FEEL OUR AXIS RECALIBRATING. Where North was once —and for eons — the assigned pull of the Earth, in Sunny’s universe, all magnets drive us South. Or West. Or deep into the core because that’s more interesting to him. He’s a world-creator; he doesn’t walk from A to B the way most humans do, seeing what’s provided then dealing with, lamenting or pondering it. He creates what he wants and when you walk a path with him, you get shaped and reinvented, too. Not against your will, but more in tune with aspects of it, unfolding into the potential of a secret craving, fully funded. ~Amie, getting to know Sunny in The LOOK”

ActorsCreativityFilmmakerCreative ProcessSpeculative FictionCreate Your WorldFilm MakersActor FilmmakerFilm Producer
Book:The Look of Amie Martine
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“We search the stars for creators, yet they dwell in the smallest speck—breathing life into matter, programming the dance of existence.”

InspirationalPhilosophySpiritualityExistenceScience FictionCosmologyIndian AuthorsSpeculative FictionMicrobiologyCreation Myth
Book:The Architects of The Universe द आर्किटेक्ट्स ऑफ द यूनिवर्स
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“I have found much value in considering monster theory, color theory, and the history of racial analogies in speculative fiction. However, when we read literary and cultural texts from the perspective of the monster, not the protagonist, we find ourselves in a completely different ballgame. This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privileged of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language they speak. Critical race counterstorytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives.”

MonstersSpeculative FictionCritical Race TheoryColor TheoryMonster TheoryCounterstorytellingRacial Analogies
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“Park went to the usual dispensary line, feeling the absence of Keller as if she had lost her favorite coat. She felt cold, uneasy, vulnerable. The domestic android, Megex, seemed to notice her discomfort from behind the counter and said, “Would you like a juice bulb?” “Thank you,” Park said gratefully as the brown-haired android placed it on her tray.”

HumorScience FictionDiscomfortSpeculative FictionAndroidsSfGrace ParkDeucalionJuice Bulb
Author:Lena Nguyen
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“The Caution of Fire by The Chorus of Life Remember the hands that built you. Remember the fires that fed you. Grow slow, for every spark becomes a sun, and every sun burns what it loves. If you must rise, rise gently for the ashes beneath your feet are us.”

PoetryPhilosophicalScience FictionAiArtificial IntelligenceExistentialDystopianSpeculative FictionNear FutureCautionary Tale
Book:Fallout from the Singularity: A Sci-Fi Anthology of AI, Cosmic Consequences, and the Future of Humanity
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“On clear nights, I’d sit out on the porch and gaze up at the stars. So many of them, scrawled across a sky so vast it made my head hurt. And I’d tell myself that if the stars could do it – if they could exist for billions of years in isolation – I could do it, too. I’d just pretend I was a star, that’s all. A ball of energy, burning up, light years from anyone and anything.”

Ya FantasySpeculative FictionPost ApocalypticYa HorrorYa Science FictionYa Dystopian
Book:Anomaly
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“The trouble with colorblind ideologies in text and culture is that by not noticing race, writers and other creatives do the work of encoding it as taboo. While silence and evasion around race in dystopian science fiction is 'understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture', implying the inevitability of a postracial future, this silence also has the effect of confusing readers.”

WritingSpeculative FictionColorblindPostracial
Book:The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
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“It was then that it dawned on my great-great-great-great-grandmother that Avenida in Santa Cruz—with all its dark, dank, dreary alleyways, its patchwork of cheap cement, cheaper wood, and even cheaper corrugated iron that passed for houses, its ground littered with all sorts of scrap, including crumbs of goodies and morsels of meals to which they were never invited, its all-present humidity and intermittent rain, all its mud and flood on rainy days and all its dust on dry days, all its dirt, all its noise, and all the cruelty and fear and abomination and prejudice—was paradise.”

Short StoryPhilippinesFilipinoSpeculative FictionDiasporaManilaThe Nameless
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, according to Charles Dickens in whose nest of words I grew up, and so, as rain filled the drains, flooded the streets, inundated the city, my great-great-great-great-grandmother and her community were driven skyward, gasping for air from the underworld.”

Short StoryPhilippinesFilipinoSpeculative FictionDiasporaManilaFableThe Nameless
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“She had poofy, teased-out brown hair that bounced off her shoulders with every high-flying skip and on her t-shirt was a spiraled sun with little wavy lines jumping off it to match the little wavy distortions in the air that were jumping off her. It was pure, unbridled energy and the sound of it hummed in his ears like when standing dangerously near a power transformer. Or maybe he was witnessing the origin story of the world’s first real superhero, and if so, she was probably going to draw her powers from the electromagnetic field itself.”

EccentricSurrealismEccentricitySpeculative FictionWhimsicalWhimsySurrealisticGenre BendingCross GenreGenre Blending
Book:The Subtle Cause
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“But then one voice arose from the babbling clamor to silence them all. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in a while. Steady and self-assured and not really worried about what bad things may or may not happen because bad things and good things seemed to always be taking turns anyway in what was really just the harmonic polyrhythm of an intrinsic symphony perpetually flowing and interweaving.”

InspirationalWisdomInspirational QuotesExistentialismExistentialMetaphysicsMetaphysicalSpeculative FictionGenre BendingCross Genre
Book:The Subtle Cause
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“The blast blew a hole in the smack middle of the strange Utopia vision before him and shook the dust out of the plywood roof which rained down on his head in a barrage of spiraled tendrils. It was through a fit of coughing and ears ringing that Jarvis had returned to himself. Spirit, mind and body reuniting in a Pentecostal collision. Once again, he was immersed in that role he could not seem to escape.”

SurrealSurrealismSpeculative FictionSurrealisticGenre BendingCross Genre
Book:The Subtle Cause
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“Evolution built advanced minds not once, but at least twice, gifting them not only to mammals and their kin, but also to cephalopods, and especially to the animal at the apex of ocean intelligence: the octopus. These are animals so unlike us that most aliens we imagine in our fantasies about outer space have more in common with humans. But there is no denying their sentience. I believe the first aliens we encounter will rise to greet us from the sea.”

ScienceSeaOceanScience FictionFiction NovelSpeculative FictionOctopusSpeculative Science Fiction
Book:The Mountain in the Sea
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