Speculative Fiction Quotes

“Let the spirits guide you, but never let them take you.”
― E.J. Stevens, Spirit Storm

“Helen dared to look up without being invited to do so. “I cannot
thank you enough for your kindness, Lady Consort.”
“Kindness had nothing to do with it. You have skills and training I
need just now, and I intend to use you shamelessly, and expose you to
greater danger.”
“Get in line, Lady Consort,” Helen replied. “Danger-filled usury
seems to be a holiday pastime in this city.”
The Consort stopped pretending to do her needlework. “I could
have you whipped for such insolence, girl.”
“Before or after you use me.”
― Candace L. Talmadge, Stoneslayer: Book One Scandal

“The only one everlasting love is the unrealized one. The love to this thing that you’d never had. Behind it is hidden the love to your own ego and feelings.”
― Alexandar Tomov, Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth

“And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied."
"By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy.
"No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment.”
― Daniel O'Malley, The Rook

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Love Has Neither Time Nor Distance”
― Alexander Morpheigh, The Pythagorean

“Knowledge Is Power and Power Is Dangerous”
― Alexander Morpheigh, The Pythagorean

“The World Is Ruled by Numbers”
― Alexander Morpheigh, The Pythagorean

“The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!”
― Bob Bello, Sci-fi Almanac, 2010: An Anthology of Short Stories

“You’re also only half-human, but you seem to identify completely with humans”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Millions cheer the warrior
spilling blood across the ring
while the one who stands for peace
is ridiculed and shamed.
Must hearts forever suffer
from ignorance and greed?
Can bombs heal our souls
or set our spirits free?”
― Aberjhani, Songs from the Black Skylark zPed Music Player

“There were no more nation-states, only a world government.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“They could be totally ignored by Earth without infringing on their lifestyle because of the vastness of the planet.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“It was the truth, but not the whole truth.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“They are fully under our control and nowhere as powerful as the old AIs of the past. They’re individual machines and cannot control vast networks.”
”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“It was such a change to burst out of the twilight zone suddenly into the panoply of stars and planets.
”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Funny, they made this new genre called Speculative Fiction, I thought all fiction had always been speculative.”
― Teri Louise Kelly

“The ship had made the jump into hyperspace, so there were no stars or worlds to be seen, just a vortex of light and shade they were passing through.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“However, they were still banned, so that humans could chart their own destiny.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Sci-Fi, Space-Travel, Space-Opera, Chance-Encounters, Adventure-Reads, Speculative-Fiction, Book-Quotes”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“Sound waves, regardless of their frequency or intensity, can only be detected by the Mole Fly’s acute sense of smell—it is a little known fact that the Mole Fly’s auditory receptors do not, in fact, have a corresponding center in the brain designated for the purposes of processing sensory stimuli and so, these stimuli, instead of being siphoned out as noise, bypass the filters to be translated, oddly enough, by the part of the brain that processes smell. Consequently, the Mole Fly’s brain, in its inevitable confusion, understands sound as an aroma, rendering the boundary line between the auditory and olfactory sense indistinguishable.

Sounds, thus, come in a variety of scents with an intensity proportional to its frequency. Sounds of shorter wavelength, for example, are particularly pungent. What results is a species of creature that cannot conceptualize the possibility that sound and smell are separate entities, despite its ability to discriminate between the exactitudes of pitch, timbre, tone, scent, and flavor to an alarming degree of precision. Yet, despite this ability to hyper-analyze, they lack the cognitive skill to laterally link successions of either sound or smell into a meaningful context, resulting in the equivalent of a data overflow.
And this may be the most defining element of the Mole Fly’s behavior: a blatant disregard for the context of perception, in favor of analyzing those remote and diminutive properties that distinguish one element from another. While sensory continuity seems logical to their visual perception, as things are subject to change from moment-to-moment, such is not the case with their olfactory sense, as delays in sensing new smells are granted a degree of normality by the brain. Thus, the Mole Fly’s olfactory-auditory complex seems to be deprived of the sensory continuity otherwise afforded in the auditory senses of other species. And so, instead of sensing aromas and sounds continuously over a period of time—for example, instead of sensing them 24-30 times per second, as would be the case with their visual perception—they tend to process changes in sound and smell much more slowly, thereby preventing them from effectively plotting the variations thereof into an array or any kind of meaningful framework that would allow the information provided by their olfactory and auditory stimuli to be lasting in their usefulness.

The Mole flies, themselves, being the structurally-obsessed and compulsive creatures that they are, in all their habitual collecting, organizing, and re-organizing of found objects into mammoth installations of optimal functional value, are remarkably easy to control, especially as they are given to a rather false and arbitrary sense of hierarchy, ascribing positions—that are otherwise trivial, yet necessarily mundane if only to obscure their true purpose—with an unfathomable amount of honor, to the logical extreme that the few chosen to serve in their most esteemed ranks are imbued with a kind of obligatory arrogance that begins in the pupal stages and extends indefinitely, as they are further nurtured well into adulthood by a society that infuses its heroes of middle management with an immeasurable sense of importance—a kind of celebrity status recognized by the masses as a living embodiment of their ideals. And yet, despite this culture of celebrity worship and vicarious living, all whims and impulses fall subservient, dropping humbly to the knees—yes, Mole Flies do, in fact, have knees!—before the grace of the merciful Queen, who is, in actuality, just a puppet dictator installed by the Melic papacy, using an old recycled Damsel fly-fishing lure. The dummy is crude, but convincing, as the Mole flies treat it as they would their true-born queen.”
― Ashim Shanker, Don't Forget to Breathe

“In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Any beginning is also an ending, you know. You can’t have just the one.”
― Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue

“It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath”
― Cynthia Willerth, A Matter of Honor

“Sometimes the scariest part of waking up isn’t what you remember — it’s what the world wants you to forget.”
― Vidwesh Mushkam, Parallax: The Commencement

“The fear of AI isn’t that it will do what humanity does better —
it’s that it will do the worst of what we already do, better.”
― Lawrence Nault

“We search the stars for creators, yet they dwell in the smallest speck—breathing life into matter, programming the dance of existence.”
― Dr. C. M. Mane, The Architects of The Universe द आर्किटेक्ट्स ऑफ द यूनिवर्स

“No matter how hopelessly miserable her life seemed, one unexpected encounter while singing on the street transformed it into miraculous bliss, forever changing her world.”
― Ema Nojman (Predrag Šiđanin))

“People think--wrongly--that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit of listening to predictions for what the future will bring and then doing something quite different.

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present--taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It's cautionary.”
― Neil Gaiman