Saved by Tara McMullin and
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
Fiction, even of the most "realistic" kind, represents what never happened, what isn't, but what maybe yet could be, in a different world than this. It's always moving in opposition to reality. All art is motion, and in motion. A good story goes in a direction that we were unable, previously, to see.
Lyta Gold • Dangerous Fictions
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Left Hand of Darkness: 50th Anniversary Edition (Ace Science Fiction)
“the best of fiction is literally false but symbolically true. It uses made-up people and non-existent events to explore and understand eternal questions that haunt the hearts of men. Great fiction uses lies to get to the truth, and it’s this truth that people are after.”
— Hit Reverse: New Ideas From Old Books by Jash Dholani
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— Hit Reverse: New Ideas From Old Books by Jash Dholani
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“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that is makes sense. We force the world to be coherent—to tell us a story.
Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, continually, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story go made. Or, like infants or (perha
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