Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of addressing change in literature, particularly in science fiction.
David Brin highlights that change is a defining characteristic of contemporary life, and literature, especially science fiction, should take an active role in examining how individuals and societies respond to these transformations. By facing change directly in narratives, science fiction can provide insights into the human experience in an ever-evolving world.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the themes of a science fiction novel during a book club.
Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.
We, all of us, are awakening to the reality that how men have behaved toward women for eons is not OK. The rules are changing invisibly underneath our feet. I am playing catch up. Maybe we all are.
I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
The international community spends much more time and resources managing crises than preventing them. But TV cameras are seldom there when a conflict is avoided, so it is difficult for governments and international organizations to make prevention a priority.
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