Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be — a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they — and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
“I cannot believe that the expression of one’s ideas has anything to do with the making of literature. I don’t believe that ideas are a novelist’s problem. Ideas should be left to the people who have ideas — philosophers, politicians, teachers. Artists can be extremely dull in terms of what they believe, what they say, and what they do in their lives. Writers don’t think.”
Gilbert Sorrentino