A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.
Interpretation
Science fiction addresses human issues through a lens of scientific possibilities.
This quote by Theodore Sturgeon emphasizes that the essence of a good science fiction narrative lies in its exploration of human challenges and solutions, while being deeply intertwined with scientific concepts. It suggests that the unique scenarios presented in science fiction are not merely fantastical but are essential to framing and solving real human dilemmas, showcasing the genre's ability to reflect on the human experience in the context of scientific exploration and innovation.
In practice
During a panel discussion on the impact of technology on society.
I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called other, which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.
There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.
Love's a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with.
In the midst of all dwells the Sun. For who could set this luminary in another or better place in this most glorious temple, than whence he can at one and the same time brighten the whole.
My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.
Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
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