By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

Acquaintances of mine frequently email me quotations that they find meaningful—succinct expressions of wisdom or humor, usually from philosophical, literary or comedic sources. I realized awhile back that I’ve never been sent a quote from science fiction.

I read a lot. I think that it’s almost impossible to remain free of addiction in our society in this historical moment, and one of my addictions is novels. As addictions go, it’s healthier than crack, and not as healthy as exercise.

About 80% of the novels that I read are science fiction. But at least 80% of science fiction is drivel. It’s stories of men, women, and aliens who live in very different places and times, use spectacular gadgets, yet whose behavior, institutions and modes of thought are remarkably like those of present-day Americans.

The kind of science fiction that I like might more aptly be called, “social science fiction.” Some call it “speculative fiction.” It posits changes in certain essential conditions and speculates on how intelligent beings’ thought, behavior, and social creations would change accordingly.  It can illuminate our unexamined assumptions about our world and ourselves. Through the lens of the “alien,” it can reacquaint us with the “ordinary.”

So a couple of years ago, I started marking passages that that made me go, “Hmmm,” when I was reading science fiction novels. Here are some of them.

 

“Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

 

“Most of the stupidity, bad behavior, and hostility of adolescents comes from being held in a state of enforced uselessness.”

—John Barnes, Candle

 

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”

—China Miéville, Embassytown

 

“The world is full of surprises.  We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”

—Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

 

“Even though the commandment says ‘You shall have no other God before me,’ the Scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. …Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God made the rock, and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.”

—Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

 

“In times of trouble the temptation to trade thought for symbol is overwhelming.”

—George Foy, The Memory of Fire

 

“Truth does not become more or less true, depending on whether those who know it are many or few.”

—John C. Wright, The Golden Age

 

“Certainty is what most people prefer to truth, and it can’t be kept from them.”

—John Barnes, Candle

 

“We shall not be making a little desert, or laterizing the soil of a single plain; we shall be laying waste to the entire world.  The survivors will hate and despise us for it…because we are motivated not by dreams of glory, but by cowardice and willful blindness.  They will be right to hate and despise us, because we know what we are doing. They will know that we had a choice, and that what we chose to do was to destroy the world.”

—Brian Stableford, The Cassandra Complex

 

“Courage is an admirable last resort, for when intelligence fails.”

—David Brin, Kiln People

 

“Now we say that everything Lenin taught us about communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”

—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

 

“The genuine issues were the issues that political people lacked clichés for.”

—Bruce Sterling, The Zenith Angle

 

“Strive only to be worthy of it, not to deserve it.”

—Susan R. Matthews, The Devil and Deep Space

 

“Enough is as good as a feast.  And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars

 

“Cruelty is the intimacy of last resort.”

—Robert Charles Wilson, Blind Lake

 

“Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil.  Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic.”

—Sheri S. Tepper, The Visitor

 

“You can’t defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can’t understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can’t know the desires of his heart until you truly love him.”

—Orson Scott Card, Shadow Puppets

 

“Experience is useful for dealing with bad people and bad relationships; for good ones, you have to make it up as you go along.”

—John Barnes, Merchants of Souls

 

“Markets are wasteful:  They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap.  So why do they persist?….Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend.  You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests.”

—Charles Stross, Accelerando

 

“If God is omniscient, why does he need prayer to make him aware of the things troubling people?  And if he is aware, why are humans so presumptuous as to ask him to change events for them?”

—Karen Traviss, The World Before

 

“If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.”

—Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

 

“Don’t you find that predators are those who most often assert absolute rights to personal freedoms?”

—Sheri S. Tepper, The Fresco

 

“Regrets, however, were only useful as instruction, not as a dwelling place.”

—CJ Cherryh, Deliverer

 

I also mark descriptive passages whose free-wheeling similes and metaphors make me chuckle, like these:

 

“He’s the sort of guy who could host a Tupperware party for the Hell’s Angels.”

—Jeffrey Anderson, Sleeper Cell

 

“Sometimes, the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in its starting cage.”

—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

 

“He was a sulky child, not especially bright, showing little interest in anything he couldn’t eat or break….”

—Paul McAuley, The Quiet War

 

“Over an expensive meal, the two propositioned me with the glib confidence available to those who not only have never known failure, but were also spending someone else’s money.”

—Jonathen Lethem, Chronic City

 

Finally, I’ve lost track of who wrote this, but it accurately describes the increasingly common state of my middle-aged brain:

 

“Like a three-year-old who has a habit of vanishing into crowds as soon as you turn your back, his memories had fled to the same place as words that are on the tip of your tongue, precedents for deja vu, and last night’s dreams.”