Science Fiction

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth. To know it, to speak it, and to serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, “There, that's the truth!”

We have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it — that we've been changed a little, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just how we learned or how we changed…

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?