Alternate Realities Quotes

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

I always like worlds where you could be in several different time periods.

Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.

Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't believe 'The War of the Worlds' or 'The Time Machine' have ever been bettered. Plus, I have always had a liking for Victorian and Edwardian clothes and contraptions, which tends to color the worlds I dream up.

One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318).

All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

You never miss what you've never had. I never had any other life. I didn't know any other life.

String theory envisions a multiverse in which our universe is one slice of bread in a big cosmic loaf. The other slices would be displaced from ours in some extra dimension of space.

If I get a parking ticket, there is always a parallel universe where I didn't. On the other hand, there is yet another universe where my car was stolen.

Practically all SF is trash.

I can also be very happy in this life, but it's usually happiness that I get from other lives I've lived and other dimensions. This life is hardly important to me. It's very small compared to the importance that I think the fourth and fifth dimension have. Those places are much more real to me, like when you have a dream and it's more real to you than real life. Compared to where I'll be going, this life seems like a dream that just feels like a dream.

There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number... are borne on far out into space.

I think that science fiction has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change. I cannot overemphasize the importance of that idea.

With Legion, we're our own universe. It gives Noah [Hawley] the freedom to do what he wants to do. Because we play with so many different timelines, and we rebooted and not really rebooted and all that, we felt like, OK, we're going to throw it out there and hope the fans accept it.

Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.

There are worlds beyond worlds and times beyond times, all of them true, all of them real, and all of them (as children know) penetrating each other.

When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment.

Don't judge me, you could be me in another life.

The trend today is vampires, zombies, angels, all the stuff that puts me right to sleep. It's too bad because it's so much less interesting than the diversity of stories you can tell with science.

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations.

My briefest ever definition of science fiction is 'Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.'

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.