93 quotes
One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.
Report On Probability A (1968)
You were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex.
Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
The day of the android has dawned.
We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.
The Glass Forest (1986)
Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretence devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded.
The Glass Forest (1986)
One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF.
These people, scattered all over the country, a few of them on the continent, were much like normal people. To outsiders, their relationship was not apparent; they certainly never revealed it; they never met.
Let's Be Frank (1957)
Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.
Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (1973)
The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything.
Let's Be Frank (1957)
Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century.
The Glass Forest (1986)
You know why I am a prisoner—because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment.
Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
I knew there was no ultimate ‘secret of the universe’—and in any case, supposing humanity to be merely a construct of the Korlevalulaw: who then ‘constructed’ the Korlevalulaw? The prime question was merely set back one step.
All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.
Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.
Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light.
Outside (1955)
All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all....Ah, well, that’s not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?
Greybeard (1964)
The story returns over and over to the painting The Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt, which becomes a recurring unresolved image which has no final meaning, only whatever speculation it's benighted observers bring to bear on it.
The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.
Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)
Synthetic life-forms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year.
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)
In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)
There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains — plastic things without life, super-toys — but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh.
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)