A Quote by Brian Aldiss
Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.
Related Quotes
I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things.
One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.
With 'The Keep,' I began with a theory about pitting the isolated disconnection of the gothic realm against present-day hyperconnectedness. I emerged feeling that the gothic genre is all about hyperconnectedness - the possibility of disembodied communication - and that we now live in a kind of permanently gothic state.
I'm not a futurist, and my taste in science fiction was sort of in the gothic horror vein, not space movies and futuristic stuff.
Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real.
I hate the word gothic but I would like to try doing something like that. A gothic sound, not rock, but gothic. There's a difference.
There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: 'Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.'
Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
The gothic reminds us that we are mainly driven by our passions; the Gothic deals in illicit desires, in what is prohibited by society.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.
I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they're always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, 'We're going to break all the laws of physics.' ... Most people don't realize it, but the series of films which have made more money than any other series of films in the history of the universe is the James Bond series. They're all science fiction, too - romantic, adventurous, frivolous, fantastic science fiction!
I had decided after 'Hollow Man' to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even 'Basic Instinct' is kind of science fiction.
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