William Tenn

Quotes

1. People quoted Henry Dorselblad’s indictment of modern society: “Women needed the law’s special protection when they were legally inferiors of men. Now they have equality and special protection. They can’t have both!”

   p. 231

2. 

   “Take it easy, Fatty, and we'll be all right,” I told him with all the assurance of a bank robber trying to explain to the policeman who caught him that he was only trying to deposit his gun in the vault and the cashiers misunderstood him.

   p. 186

3. 

   His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste—they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key.

   p. 51

4. 

   And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia.

   p. 7

5. 

   Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither.

   p. 11

6. 

   They are a highly individualistic people and still experience many frictions living in a centralized society. Despite several centuries of advanced civilization, most Gtetans look upon the Law as a delightful problem in circumvention rather than as a way of life.

   p. 77

7. 

   “Wh-who are you? And what do you want?”

   “Joseph Burns, a poor but honest newspaperman.” He considered for a moment. “Well, poor, anyway.”

   p. 105

8. 

   But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “Except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

   p. 99

9. 

   Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends.

   p. 10

10. 

    Irving Bommer looked like a man who had gone down into the Valley of the Shadow and had seen much more there to fear than such picayune things as Evil.

    p. 90

11. 

    “It's a rough war, isn't it?”

    I smiled back. “Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it.”

    p. 18

12. 

    The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.

    p. 12