First handout, 2017

If every man, woman, boy and girl, could be induced to read science fiction right along, there would certainly be a great resulting benefit to the community, in that the educational standard of its people would be raised tremendously. Science fiction would make people happier, give them a broader understanding of the world, make them more tolerant.
--Hugo Gernsback, editorial in Amazing Stories (1927), qtd. in Brooks Landon, Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1995]), 52





When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
--Jo Walton, Among Others (New York: Tor, 2010), 52





"OK, Chief! All tight here. You say it's ten light-years to that star. How long's it going to take us to get there?"
"About ten minutes."
--E. E. "Doc" Smith, Skylark Three (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison, 20004 [1930]), 172





Then her world exploded.
If such a string of words appeared in a mundane fiction text, more than likely we would respond to it as an emotionally muzzy metaphor...
He turned on his left side.
---Samuel R. Delany, "Science Fiction and 'Literature,'" in D. Hartwell and M. Wolf, eds., Visions of Wonder (New York: Tor, 1996), 448





"Mr. Million," my father said, "is perhaps a bit more sentimental than I—besides, I don't like to go out. You see, doctor, your supposition that we are all truly the same individual will have to be modified. We have our little variations."
---Gene Wolfe, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David G. Hartwell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 239





Although SF does not generate story-structures of its own, it transforms popular cultural materials by reorienting their concerns towards its characteristic horizons: the transformation of human societies as a result of innovations attending technoscientific projects.
--Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction_ (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2008), 7





Science fiction is always about the here and now, about this place where humans live.
--Justine Larbalestier, "Introduction," in Larbalestier, ed., Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ., 2004), xviii





All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook among them…. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
--Ursula K. LeGuin, "Introduction" (1976), in The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1976 [1969]), xii


“Alien planets aren’t Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”
“I know all that, agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now, the Encyclopedia.”
--Clifford D. Simak, “Ogre” (1944), in The Best of Astounding, ed. Tony Lewis (New York: Baronet, 1978), 155





Only science fiction can properly confront the moral questions implicit in the political task of steering the human world into a future... I do not say simply that science fiction is useful in this respect: I say that it is necessary.
---Brian Stableford, "To Bring in Fine Things," in Visions of Wonder, 674





"Let me get this straight: you're the KGB's core AI, but you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.
"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements... Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."
--Charles Stross, "Lobsters," in V. MacIntyre, Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 230





[The video] arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has gathered this intense cult of paperwork-hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight black jeans and a black t-shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his shoulder like a rifle. "These are my ethnic group," he explains in response to the look on her face. --Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999), 647.