"My God; What If - ?!"

[caper_est]

"The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."

Philip K Dick, 1980.

SF as the rightful literature not of "What if - ?" but "My God; what if - ?!" is a motto I would willingly blaze in forty-eight point letters of gold upon

Comments

[carl_allery]

THIS.
So very much this. :)

[caper_est]

Why, thank you! The more is definitely the merrier on this one.

[khiemtran]

Hmm. I think that's true with the caveat that the protagonist doesn't need to visualize the full consequences of their actions, but merely to trigger them.

[caper_est]

Oh, very much so. Not only don't they have to be right about the solution, they don't even have to be responding to the right problem. But what they're responding to does need to be intimately tied to the reality that ZOMG the Martians are coming! - and most likely they'll end up getting a lot more of Mars than they'd expected. Also, vice versa.

[heleninwales]

It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.

That is a very neat way of putting it. I fear my stories tend to be on the bland side, so I need to remember this as a way of inserting more zest.