Brian M. Stableford > Quotes

“It doesn't have to be this way...Whatever else is lost, the knowledge isn't. Just because things get out of hand, just because things get smashed, just because everything comes apart, it doesn't mean that it always has to be that way, now and forever. Whether it's care that does it or sheer blind luck, things can work, things can grow, things can change and still stay together. If only they get enough chances, things can work out in the end. We're here, aren't we? In all our awesome complexity, we're here, even though we started out as nothing but ambitious dirt, nothing but clever clay. And in the end, one way or another, we'll find a way to get it all together, to make things work. That's life, May. That's what real life is all about.”
― Brian Stableford

“All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained —however improbable— must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.”
― Brian Stableford

“The Empire was in a state of irreversible decline, and what the future held was not a war to end war which would secure Anglo-Saxon hegemony for all time but a great orgy of stupid butchery which would test almost to destruction every optimistic philosophy of progress which could be rallied against its apocalyptic implications, whether religious, political or technophilic. The crucifixion of Oscar Wilde by the rampant spirit of imperial vanity proved to be the prelude to the crucifixion of an entire generation, sent to die in the muddied fields of northern France.”
― Brian Stableford

“By the same token that all history is a kind of fantasy, though, all fantasy is in its own fashion a kind of history. Whatever we invent we must build from the foundations of what we know of the hopes and fears, desires and ambitions of men. All fantasy reflects that knowledge, just as all knowledge partakes of fantastic speculation. For this reason, we must by no means despise histories of pasts which never were, for they may help us nevertheless to understand what we are and may become. Perchance they may even help us to a better understanding of ourselves than that history in which we have consente4d to believe.

[Epilogue, section 2]”
― Brian M. Stableford, The Werewolves of London