Karl Schroeder Quotes
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'The great commandment of the narratives is that your life must be meaningful,' said Charon. 'If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed.'
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I remember the moon landings, and Apollo was the paradigm by which all progress was measured at that time. And I knew that creating a true space-faring civilization was both possible and practical. What I failed to realize was that the effort would fail due to bureaucratic inertia and political apathy.
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There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.
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Around 2005, the Canadian army tapped me to do a dramatization for a series of foresight workshops they'd done. They had stacks of papers and needed it boiled down to something simple enough for a 4-star general to understand. We decided to do it as a story. That's how I created 'Crisis in Zefra.'
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If I want to speculate wildly about the future, I have my science fiction. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is either crazy or lying.
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I thought of myself as an outsider in a lot of ways as I was growing up. Not in a bad way; more as an observer. I often find myself thinking as an observer of science fiction rather than as a participant.
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Andy Clark has several books you can find on Amazon, including 'Natural Born Cyborgs' and 'Being There.' I particularly recommend 'Being There' to anybody who still thinks the Cartesian separation of mind and body should be taken seriously.
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Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.
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My mother wrote a couple of romances when I was a kid, and I always saw books in our bookshelf with 'Schroeder' on the spine.
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Maybe it's because I look into the future professionally, but I see great possibilities for both humanity and our planet. I don't believe the thriving of one has to come at the expense of the other, and I'm deeply concerned to find out whether other people do think that.
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I intended to be famous by the time I was 16 and rich by the time I was 20. Curiously, it didn't pan out!
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The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.
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But what good’s abundance if nobody can experience it?
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I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.
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The one thing we know about the future is that it will not be like today. I don't think that people should be too anxious about not knowing what they are going to do in the future, because we really can't know.
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That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.
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Andy Clark refers to humans as 'natural-born cyborgs.' What he means is that we habitually extend and change our body-concept without even thinking twice about it.
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Only the dead are free of the influence of others.
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'Technologies are control systems,' she said. 'They dictate your reality.'
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In such a way she had done what her people prized above all else: she had given her respect to those different from herself.
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The being was trying to get him to think about what he was saying, not just recite.
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Idiots. They were losing everything because of their short-sightedness. Maybe they deserved to lose it.
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'I haven’t organized my life as a narrative, you know. I’m not sure you’ll understand.''As listeners, we are not required to understand,' said Qiingi. 'Only to care.'
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What’s real is what’s valuable. Everything else is just an illusion.