Speculative Fiction Quotes

Because there wasn’t anything else to do, he settled at the kitchen tablewith a bottle of mead and nearly emptied it. The anesthetic effect he hoped for hadn’t happened, though. At least not yet.

Ann Gimpel

Hades cracked his knuckles on each hand, and the noise was like gunpowder caps exploding in the silence. "First dish duty," he mumbled to himself, "now possessed cowboys. This just isn't my night.

Josh Strnad

He shook his head again. “I’m afraid I don’t feel much of anything these days. Especially not hope. I have no time or energy to waste on false wishes and dreams that won’t come true.”“Hope isn’t about ignorant wishing.” She surprised even herself with herdefensive backlash. “Hope is about believing—believing there are betterthings in store for us if we just wait for them. It’s about understanding we’re not left completely on our own here, regardless of the way things appear.”Lamont snorted. “That ain’t much for a body to go on.”“Perhaps not, but I reckon it’s enough. Sometimes it’s gotta be, anyhow.Without hope, what would drive one onward?”He was silent for a long moment before he looked up and met her eyes.His own eyes displayed no emotion when he answered in a weary, grimtone, “Fear.” He took a drink and fell silent again as she quietly scrutinized him, attempting to discern in his haggard face the thoughts behind what he had said.

Josh Strnad

To my surprise, the sensation of query filled my stomach, spreading through to every corner. This was followed by each point of query ending at the same answer. Device Nineteen had responded to the question by coming to the conclusion that oblivion was the end of every

J. Cameron McClain

With timid curiosity, I asked, “what do you mean the old bodies get reused?

Andrew Cormier

[sic] his reaction was a sign of civilization. Nobody reaches for a gun anymore, just for his lawyer.

Peter F. Hamilton

I told you stupid sons of bitches that this was going to happen!

John A. Autero

First contact comes not by hand of man, but by metal of machine.

Ryan Sean O'Reilly

Complete. What an awful word for an infected people, that final, animal stage that was the future of all of them. Chels swallowed, unsure what to say. “That’s…sad. I didn’t even know he was infected.”Semesz whispered, “He was just infected yesterday. We saw him last night, and he already had mouse whiskers and a tail.

Daniel Ausema

illustration Speaking before the Marion Hobby Club Marion, OH 2013 This writer is looking for an agent.An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe.

Kelly Steed

An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe.

Kelly Steed

When she sat down on the tile next to him, unafraid, his kaleidoscope senses drank in the years that had been printed onto her mind before she was old enough to remember, and he told her a story, projecting into her darkness sensations of light and color and shape, butterflies swirling like silk-spun gold out through a window that opened to a big green field in the days before the bomb.

Mel Paisley

The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.

William Gibson

It is as it is. Betren son of Bromwell Defender of Delmarath

Cynthia Willerth

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

Margaret Atwood

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

Even in forgetting there is an aspect of recollection, a faded few moments of wispy consciousness clung like webs in high-vaulted chambers, moving ever so lightly with the draft.

Jeffrey Panzer

If the world explore all my dark fantasy, will change for the better”.

Alexandar Tomov

The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.

James S.A. Corey

My hopes for pie died on the sidewalk. There went my grin.

Carrie Butler

All because I fell in love with a madman.

Carrie Butler

I mean, that was the code, wasn’t it? Single girls and taken guys weren’t allowed to be friends. The leash always got in the way.

Carrie Butler

One second she’s all timid, and then reeoowr! Hellcat.

Carrie Butler

Quote from “Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth”: “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

Good fantasy fiction: ... explores real human conditions through fantastic metaphors which universalize the characters' individual experiences to speak personally to us all.

Laura Resnick

One day, I decided to be an island. I took off my clothes and walked into the sea, then floated there, bobbing along with the tide, suspended by my inflatable tube and water wings.

Ng Yi-Sheng

As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.

Ken Liu

Rebecca woke up with her knees hurting and her fingers ice-cold, and the specifics of her life returned to her as the dream disappeared: weekend, hotel room, Baguio, memory, memory, memory.

Eliza Victoria

The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.

Haruki Murakami

Koji pulled Ruben onto the next cog. Together, they became part of the space between things.

Bruce Whatley

Reality worked its way into my dreams where it wasn’t welcome.

Emilyann Girdner

I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen's eternal river.

Eugie Foster

People won't change until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain changing brings.

Just B. Jordan

Closed head trauma is about as much fun as nude paintballing.

D.C. Farmer

Matt shrugged. It was a good shrug, too. All it was missing was a beret, a stripy shirt and a Gauloise cigarette.

D.C. Farmer

You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. 'I brought this for you.

A. Merc Rustad

Let the spirits guide you, but never let them take you.

E.J. Stevens

At Tara in this fateful hour,I place all Heaven with its power,And the sun with its brightness,And the snow with its whiteness,And the fire with all the strength it hath,And the lightning with its rapid wrath,And the winds with their swiftness along their path,And the sea with its deepness,And the rocks with their steepness,And the earth with its starkness:All these I place,By God's almighty help and graceBetween myself and the powers of darkness!

Madeleine L'Engle

The gentle pulsing and flickering of stars and nebulae made a kind of music, a sweet easy mesh of whispered tones and sighing harmonies that held him in its force like the earth [holding] the moon.

Aberjhani

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.Must hearts forever sufferfrom ignorance and greed?Can bombs heal our soulsor set our spirits free?

Aberjhani

The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly!

Bob Bello

Speculative Fiction Quotes

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