Quotes from Hal Duncan

But the bigots always see those whom they hate as morally corrupt, as if they confuse their own aesthetics of disgust and fear with actual ethical critique, rationalizing their emotional response, and enforcing their moral certainties with passion, establishing them-selves, subtly or brutally, as arbiters of reason.

She has to be written out of history and written into myth.

A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old films, he said -- when you see this old parchment map just ... getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just ... fwoom.

No, we're not prisoners of flesh, I think, bound in our skins, and only waiting for the final judgment that will send us into fire or light. We're fucking prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear and shame. We're fucking prisoners of sorrow, and it's time for our release.

I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick's coffee.

So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.

Find the truth and spread the lie.

I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself.

A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old movies, he said - when you see this old parchment map just… getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just… fwoom

The Book does not play James Joyce with the Universe.

I'm not like that, he says. I'm not a … Fairy? –Every time you say that, I whisper, a little part of you will die.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper science fiction and then there's that SCI-FI shit.

Let sleeping gods lie.

Civility and etiquette, gentlemen, are all important.

Personally, I'd like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it's going to be so overloaded with meanings it's just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.

But functional was not an aesthetic criterion that Flashjack, as a faery, had terribly high on his list of priorities; it was well below shiny and nowhere near weird .

Losing maturity in one's fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that's not always a bad thing.

Dreams aren't real? I say they walk among us, whispering in our ears all their sweet promises and threats, carried in our heads, mind-words, maggots eating at our dead souls. Dreams, memes, gods and monsters, creatures of the id. If they aren't real then what the hell am I?

This is the fiction that I'm referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts.

One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum.

Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

HARD SF and EPIC FANTASY – both of these forms have been conventionalised, proscribed and prescribed, such that they constitute valid GENRES in a way that science fiction and fantasy do not.