Quotes About Speculation

Soothing stories have been plentiful in all ages. . . . To survive, a story must arouse wonder, wonder in both the senses in which we now employ the word: astonishment at the extent of man's capability of good and evil, and speculation as to the sources of that capability.

I haven't read anything but regurgitated rumors. Nothing new, and nothing true.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

In January 2013, one could buy a Bitcoin for about $13. By late November, one Bitcoin would have set a buyer back over $1100.

I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.

My only obligation is to keep myself and other people guessing.

In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of science fiction writers, who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants.

Speculative fiction by definition is geared toward an audience that wants strangeness, an audience that wants to spend time in worlds that absolutely are not like the observable world around them.

Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be.

Speculative fiction includes all stories that take place in a setting contrary to known reality.

The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation.

The horrors of the past lose their edge, and in the doing they blind us to a world careening toward a darkness beyond the bitterest speculation. It's sure to be interesting. When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.

My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.

Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper's wife's grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sign of a relationship's essential corruptness could exist than for its official realization to hinge on the demise of another human being.

They only half-jokingly speculated about whether they were the last two single people from their high school class

believe our civilization is going to collapse,' said Aunt Eva. `And what will come after it?' asked Clifford. `I haven't the faintest idea, but something, I suppose,' said the elderly lady.

They all began to guess.

Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs--what level of technology have you achieved?, etc.--is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe.

The "what-ifs": they'll do a number on you.

Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next

I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man's might be the same.