Quote

It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better.

Stanley Schmidt

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Stanley Schmidt
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: March 7
Fictioneer
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Stanley Albert Schmidt
Imagine
Future
Easy
Plausible
Better
Depressing
Way
Worthwhile
Make
Ugly
Harder
Ways

More quotes by Stanley Schmidt

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Its limitations are those of the physical universe: it won't let you play with some really wild ideas that aren't possible, but are fun to speculate about.
Stanley Schmidt
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What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
Stanley Schmidt
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There are a significant number of people who appreciate what we do, and most of them gravitate to Analog because this is where they can find it. The other magazines tend to share their audiences, which may result in each of them having a smaller market share.
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This means I must pay close attention to the writing, but equally so to the scientific background - which sometimes means doing fairly involved calculations.
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Blaming society makes it awfully easy for a person of weak character to shrug off his own responsibility for his actions.
Stanley Schmidt
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Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.
Stanley Schmidt
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There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though - it's been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments.
Stanley Schmidt
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I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example.
Stanley Schmidt
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As for sticking strictly to presently known science, I will simply point out that we have already experienced at least two major revolutions in science in this century alone.
Stanley Schmidt
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And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
Stanley Schmidt
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intricately and intriguingly woven, lots of fun, and extremely thought provoking.
Stanley Schmidt
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Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.
Stanley Schmidt