Quotes from Brian Stableford

The world is not bound to get better as a result of new discoveries in science and technology, nor is it bound to get worse, there will simply be new opportunities for making it better or worse.

Writers can express ideas and emotions that are important to them but have no other means of expression. Some of these ideas may be fantastic, and some of the emotions may be given clearer voice in fantastic fiction.

Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice.

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.

From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.

Belief in God is an elementary form of selflessness - the acknowledgement of responsibility toward a hypothetical 'Other'.

All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained —however improbable— must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.

God moves in mysterious ways. All gods do. It's the only way they can work.

Ideally, writing ought to be like riding a bicycle: something you know how to do without having to think consciously about exactly what it is that you are doing.

Not merely one of the finest fantasy novels of recent years, but one of the finest ever. Should not be missed

Unless we dream the best dreams of which we are capable, the future will be poorer than it might be.