Michelle M. Welch

“Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, "I write because I want more than one life.”
― Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer's Life

“[H.G. Wells said] that his method was "to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds." Such prestidigitation is a characteristic ploy of science fiction: to make a nonexistent entity or impossible premise acceptable (often by scientific-sounding terms such as telepathy, extraterrestrial, cavorite, FTL speed) and then follow through with a genuinely realistic, logically coherent description of the effects and implications.

Of course the accurate narrative description of the nonexistent is a basic device of all fiction. The extension to the impossible is proper to fantasy, but since we seldom know with certainty what is or is not possible, it is a legitimate element of science fiction too. What if? is a question asked by both science fiction and experimental science, and they share their method of answering it: make a postulate and then carefully observe its consequences.

- Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin”
― Ursula K. Le Guin