Alfred Bester Quotes

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool.

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

I'm a science-fiction fan. All science fiction ends up being reality.

Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.

Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

'Star Trek''s insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places.

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

I would designate as science fiction in the best sense: they are visions and anticipations by which we seek to attain a true knowledge, but, in fact, they are only imaginations whereby we seek to draw near to the reality.

Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.