Citas

I suppose that what September 11th did was not so much change how we think of the world or humanity as remind us of a lot of things we already knew about humanity. (We could have done without the reminder.) It reminds us that any time of peace and prosperity is a fortunate exception to the way the machinery ordinarily works, and in retrospect it makes you appreciate that time.

Compared to fantasy, science fiction is almost a branch of mainstream. Fantasy is based on things that are logically impossible, going in directions that apparently can't exist. Let's say mainstream fiction would be a straight, one-dimension high-speed highway rushing along between trees. Fantasy is more like a perpendicular look down a corridor of trees to a clearing. It's rotating 90°, it's a fresh dimension - and it's that perpendicular look, that dislocation or vertigo or disorientation that's the fun. It doesn't so much matter what's in the clearing over there, whether it's a unicorn or Cthulhu; it's the fact of the new dimension. The attraction of fantasy is experiencing the impossible as real, but we wouldn't bother to do it if there wasn't a kind of resonance that happens in our heads too, if there wasn't this wiring in our heads that, like an induction coil, picks up a current from it. There has to be a response in the reader's head, which implies that Jungian archetypes are in some sense real.