Quotes from Hal Duncan

For many readers, writers, editors and agents ... pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck?

Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we've had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven't yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract. We can offer any text as SF.

All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.

It's not Sci-Fi, we insist, It's SF. Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Writers are a combative bunch when it comes to aesthetics, and the generation before GENRE are born into a discourse that's been brewing since Cervantes.

AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy . Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?

Maybe there's no secret essence inside me or you or them or anybody, nothing except what we choose for ourselves. No fate, no future, no past... except what we choose. No slaves and masters for the soul, only whores and politicians.

Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.

Brain out, sponge in' fiction.

In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.

Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.

No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She'd rather have a hookah.

I kissed the boys and made them cry ... in ecstasy.

They say that nothing can stand against such a man, for the one gun – that marked Mutiny – deals instant death, but the other – the one marked Matelotage – deals instant love, like the very darts of Eros. And who, I ask ye, who can stand up to love?

The People's Independent Republic of Arse, Cock and Yo-ho-bloody-ho, I say. PIRACY! –You are a pirate! –Damn right I am! I'm Flash Jack Carter, the Darling of the Deep, the Blessed of the Briny, Sodomite Scourge of the Seven Seas ...

All gods have their houses but all houses fall eventually and when they do the gods are left with only history as their home, living in the dreams of archaeologists, in the margins of a culture's memory, in the Vellum.

Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher - takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in.

In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn't matter if you're filthy. In theory anyway.

The pleasures of the flesh are sweet. – Mmm, flesh, said Puck.

You know about psychosis, Doctor. You should recognize the symptoms. Grandiose delusions. Religious mania. Paranoid violence. Sounds like society to me.

Susurrus is a different kind of flirt though, fickle as a godling of wind can only be but light and warm as one father, bold as the other. And his is a different kind of love, one that has lasted near as long as this world has now and stayed as fresh somehow, even in his flightiness. It is Susurrus makes her sigh for those days, even though he makes them all sigh.

Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man's good character is marked by his impeccable attire.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Burning lemurs of bloody Madagascar!