Sometimes, science fiction cover artists get it right, and the result is great. Generally they get it wrong. And sometimes, they get it, well, I don’t know. Like the beefcake Gandhi-Rambo in Mike Resnick’s Alternate Warriors:
THOMASINA: When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you need stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.…
“Dear, when on some distant planet We, love’s protestants, alight, How, in our deep-space-diver suits Shall our devoted limbs unite You shall have those ruby lips In a helmet-bowl, inverted On your golden locks, enclosed: Your starry eyes shall be inserted In a plastic contact-vizor To keep out the stellar cold. And your teeth of…
“Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye. We are not presented with a representation of what we know to be true through direct experience; rather we are given what we know to be true through other means—or in the case of science fiction, what we know to be at…
Note: All characters in this novel are fictitious except possibly the Martians. – Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers (1954)
“I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.” – Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (trans. Ruth L.…
MULDER: You put such faith in your science, Scully. But the things I’ve seen, science provides no place to start. SCULLY: Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that’s a place to start. That’s where the hope is. (“Herrenvolk”, The X-Files, Season 4, Ep.01)
“Δv for velocity, delta for change. In space, this is the measure of the change in velocity required to get from one place to another – thus, a measure of the energy required to do it. Everything is moving already. But to get something from the (moving) surface of the Earth into orbit around it,…
“Anybody who ‘paints a picture’ of some coming year is kidding—he’s only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered). This book, then, is a rather bilious rib on 1950—on what 1950 might have been like if it had been allowed…
“Fiction is a kind of fact, although it takes some people centuries to get used to it. To point out that its substance is imaginary, or fantastic, is no criticism of it, for that is the kind of fact it is: a thing man has thought or imagined, rather than observed or made.” – Raymond…
SFGenics: Notes on Science, Fiction, and Science Fiction 