#fiction

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists. ↗

— Kage Baker

#science

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else. ↗

— Charles Stross

#science

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#science-fiction #writing #science

The sound came again. There was a whistle to it, and a moan. It was almost a hiss, and it could’ve been a strangled gasp. Above all, it was quiet, and it seemed to have no source. It whispered. ↗

— Cherie Priest

#zombies #science

Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else's words and notes. ↗

— Megan Lindholm

#music #science-fiction #music

We need to talk to you," said Carrot. "Do you want a lawyer?" "No, I ate already." "You *eat* lawyers?" said Carrot. "Brick gave him an empty stare until sufficient brain had been mustered. "What d'y'call dem fings, dey kinda crumble when you eat dem?" he ventured. Carrot looked at Detritus and Angua, to see if there was going to be any help there. "*Could* be lawyers," he conceded. "Dey go soggy if you dips 'em in somfing," said Brick, as if undertaking a forensic examination. "More likely to be biscuits, then?" Carrot suggested. "Could be. Inna packet wi' all paper on. Yeah, bisuits. ↗

— Terry Pratchett Thud

#humor #lawyers #science-fiction #humor

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere. ↗

— Rick Yancey

#apocalypse #cassie #fiction #god #horror

Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man. ↗

— Olaf Stapledon

#philosophy #science-fiction #beauty

Never tell a computer to forget it. ↗

— Larry Niven

#science

Ever since I could remember, She was all that mattered. ↗

— James J. Caterino

#noir #science-fiction #science