Alternative Realities Quotes

Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

Science fiction is a kind of archaeology of the future.

Performance is a vehicle for entering different worlds of experiencing.

One person's crazyness is another person's reality.

What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it is really a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things.

I don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.

I've always been a fan of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. I like working with larger-than-life characters in fascinating worlds - places where the rules are different.

I love trade magazines - any trade's magazine: by entering into what is taken for granted in a world not your own, you better recognize the vastness of the social universe - for there are so, so many worlds that are not your own.

I often think that we are like the carp swimming contentedly in that pond. We live out our lives in our own "pond," confident that our universe consists of only the familiar and the visible. We smugly refuse to admit that parallel universes or dimensions can exist next to ours, just beyond our grasp. If our scientists invent concepts like forces, it is only because they cannot visualize the invisible vibrations that fill the empty space around us. Some scientists sneer at the mention of higher dimensions because they cannot be conveniently measured in the laboratory.

Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.

There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could be pretty similar to what we have here.

But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?" "Nothing is more probable," said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.

In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

I'm interested in people with very exceptional world views or realities.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, animation, and things of that nature. Other worlds and that type of stuff.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

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

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.