Kevin Tole

“Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. It is far too rationalist and simplistic to satisfy the imaginative mind, whether the writer's or the reader's. Variables are the spice of life. [If] you like you can read [a lot of] science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what happens... In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed, nor is there any built-in dead end; thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Library of America Ursula K. Le Guin Edition

“And with it all is that fleeting sense of mortality, that lifetime is a short span of importance to the individual and unimportant in the grans scheme of continued existence.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“The first task laid on me from today: to resist the craving to share my death. Loving you, loving life, to forgive the living and take my leave without bitterness. To embrace death as my own, mine alone.”
― Coetzee, J.M.

“Those who believe that the world is evil and that you have to adapt to it – and those who believe that the world is evil but that it can be changed.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob