Sf Criticism Quotes

“One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Ray Bradbury’s entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Science fiction long assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom).”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“HARD SF and EPIC FANTASY – both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid GENRES in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we’ve had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven’t yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract.
We can offer any text as SF.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that’s been brewing since Cervantes.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Popular and unpopular don’t necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Brain out, sponge in’ fiction.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

“Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.”
― Hal Duncan, Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions