Alternate Worlds Quotes

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.

Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.

Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky secondhand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are, having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it.

The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

To me, one of the most profound questions we can ask is: "So what?" And so what if there's an indefinite number of worlds with alternate "us-es" in them? The "so what," to me, comes alive when I ask myself: "What if I could find a way to get in touch with those alternate mes who made those choices?" That is, persons who, if I saw them now, I wouldn't even recognize because their choices, once small, have multiplied to make them such different people.

I feel very strongly that I’m surrounded by other realities.

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

I have a long love of fantasy and science-fiction.

The difference between science fiction and fantasy … is simply this: science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees.

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.

The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.

I read anything and everything. Comfort food for my brain is fantasy fiction or science fiction.

There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.

Writers of all things speculative have played in alternate and parallel worlds for a long time - everyone from Stephen King to Philip Pullman to Tanith Lee - and it's an obsession that likely isn't going away any time soon.

I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.

It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.