Here are a few of my favourite quotes, from people who’ve spent their entire careers in SF and F, and which, no matter how many times I read them (and for vastly different reasons) remain an inspiration…
Ursual Le Guin on writing SFF in the 1970’s:
‘Writing was something that men set the rules for, and I had never questioned that… So I fit myself into the man’s world of writing and wrote like a man, presenting only the male point of view. My early books are all set in a man’s world. [And then literary feminism came along and I thought] hey, guess what? You’re a woman. You can write like a woman. I saw that women don’t have to write about what men write about, or write what men think they want to read. I saw that women have whole areas of experience men don’t have—and that they’re worth writing and reading about.’
The Art of Fiction No. 221, www.theparisreview.org (2014)
Margaret Atwood on the truths that set a foundation for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’:
‘I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society…’
www.theguardian.com/books/2012
Ursula Le Guin on fantasy:
‘Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude… Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.’
Foreword to ‘Tales of Earthsea’ (2001)
Octavia E Butler on labels in fiction:
‘Most of what I do is science fiction. Some of the things I do are fantasy. I don’t like the labels, they’re marketing tools, and I certainly don’t worry about them when I’m writing. They are also inhibiting factors; you wind up not getting read by certain people, or not getting sold to certain people because they think they know what you write. You say science fiction and everybody thinks Star Wars or Star Trek.’
Callaloo Journal (1991)
Ann McCaffrey on being called a fantasy writer:
‘People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form? But I must say I get a kick out of cutting them short when they call me a 'fantasy' writer.’
Writing-world.com, interview with Lynn Jamneck (2004)
Women's SF & F is my inspiration, and has a huge influence on my continuing PhD project.