(…)Through the ship’s telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly...

…science fiction is something that could happen – but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen – though often you only wish that it could.

But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience – as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a...

Yes, it made sense, and was so absurdly simple that it would take a genius to think of it. And, perhaps, someone who did not expect to do it himself.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers...

Meteorites don’t fall on the Earth. They fall on the Sun and the Earth gets in the way.” – John W. Campbell

There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape...

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much...

A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Please leave me alone; let me go on to the stars.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Just like the cosmonauts and their pee plants, all we have is each other.

. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy–of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause,...

La única posibilidad de descubrir los límites de lo posible es aventurarse un poco más allá de ellos, hacia lo imposible.

But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the...

The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice.

What was more, they had taken the first step toward genuine friendship. They had exchanged vulnerabilities.

Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.

He had sometimes wondered if the real reason why men sought danger was that only thus could they find the companionship and solidarity which they unconsciously craved.

He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.