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.
Interpretation
Science fiction has the unique ability to explore limitless possibilities beyond our current reality.
In this quote, Theodore Sturgeon expresses the boundless creativity found in science fiction, emphasizing that it allows for exploration of infinite worlds, time periods, and species. Unlike other literary genres, science fiction can delve into realms beyond our imagination, offering an expansive canvas for writers and readers alike to experience extraordinary scenarios and ideas.
In practice
A writer might use this quote to inspire creativity in a workshop about science fiction writing.
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.
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.
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.
A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.
They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.
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