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There Are Many Other Writers Whose Work I Admire Tremendously, But None Whose Work Struck Me At Just The Right Young Age. Jack Vance Taught Me That Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Could Be Wonderfully And Liberatingly Stylistic. It Didn't Have To Be Pulp Stuff. He Really Changed My Writing And My View Of Science Fiction, So If Nothing Else, My Little Homage To Him In The Novelette I Wrote For That Anthology Is My Thank-you To Him. He Helped Me See That Any Genre Can Have Excellent Writing In It.

-Dan Simmons

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There Are Many Other

Dan Simmons

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There Are Many Other Writers Whose Work I Admire Tremendously, But None Whose Work Struck Me At Just The Right Young Age. Jack Vance Taught Me That Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Could Be Wonderfully And Liberatingly Stylistic. It Didn't Have To Be Pulp Stuff. He Really Changed My Writing And My View Of Science Fiction, So If Nothing Else, My Little Homage To Him In The Novelette I Wrote For That Anthology Is My Thank-you To Him. He Helped Me See That Any Genre Can Have Excellent Writing In It.

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There Were Reprints Of American Editorials. Liberals Saw It As A Resurgence Of Social Protest And Decried The Discrimination, Poverty, And Hunger That Had Provoked It. Conservative Columnists Acidly Pointed Out That Hungry People Don't Steal Stereo Systems First And Called For A Crackdown In Law Enforcement. All Of The Reasoned Editorials Sounded Hollow In Light Of The Perverse Randomness Of The Event. It Was As If Only A Thin Wall Of Electric Lighting Protected The Great Cities Of The World From Total Barbarism.

Words Were Like Objects, Making The Idea More Solid -- Less A Poisonous Gas And More A ... Cube Of Crystallized Thought.

No Lifetime Is Long Enough For Those ... Who Simply Wish To Understand Themselves And Their Lives. It Is, Perhaps, The Curse Of Being Human, But Also A Blessing.

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You've Probably Heard About The Theory Of Steam-engine Time - That Even After The Steam Engine Had Been Invented, It Had To Wait Until People Were Ready To Make Use Of It. The Same Thing Happens In Literary Circles. The Truth Is, I'm Not Terribly Interested In Victorian Times; I'm Interested In Victorian Writers. I'm Interested In Most Eras Of History, But Not The Victorian Era Especially. I Was Interested In The John Franklin Expedition. I Was Interested In These Last Five Weird Years Of Dickens' Life. And I Just Have To Take The Age That Comes With All That When I Write About It.

The Shortest Route To Courage Is Absolute Ignorance.

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Mystery. The Strangeness Of Place So Necessary To Some Creative Spirits. A Perfect Mixture Of The Classical Utopia And The Pagan Mystery.

A Token Of Ecological Awareness In A Society Devoted To Self Destruction And Waste But Unwilling To Acknowledge Its Indulgent Ways.

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What, After All, Is More Real To Us Than The Geography Of Our Childhoods?

Lovemaking Seems All Too Absurd When Described.

Power: A Currency That Never Went Out Of Style.

There Is A Certain Solipsism To Serious Illness Which Claims All Of One's Attention As Certainly As An Astronomical Black Hole Seizes Anything Unlucky Enough To Fall Within Its Critical Radius.

Serious Illness

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The Love Of Violence Is An Aspect Of Our Humanity. Even The Weak Wish To Be Strong Primarily So They Can Wield The Whip.

This Is Every Writer's Nightmare - The Sudden Breakdown Of Meaning In The Language That Sustains And Supports Us.

War Must Never Be A Condition But, Rather, A Temporary Scourge Which We Suffer As A Child Does A Fever, Knowing That Health Follows The Long Night Of Pain And That Peace Is Health.

Words Bend Our Thinking To Infinite Paths Of Self-delusion, And The Fact That We Spend Most Of Our Mental Lives In Brain Mansions Built Of Words Means That We Lack The Objectivity Necessary To See The Terrible Distortion Of Reality Which Language Brings.

You Treat Violence As An Aberration ... When In Truth It Is The Norm. It Is The Very Essence Of The Human Condition.

The Problem With Being Passionately In Love ... Is That It Deprives You Of Too Much Sleep.

Doing A Life Study While Drunk And In The Process Of Being Seduced Is Never A Formula For Quality Art.

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Once Upon A Time

The Powerful Have Received Their Share Of The World's Attention Even When Their Power Has Been Shown As Sheer Evil. The Victim's Remain The Faceless Masses. Numbers. Mass Graves. These Monsters Have Fertilized Our Century With The Mass Graves Of Their Victims And It Is Time That The Powerless Had Names And Faces -- And Voices.

Pain And Darkness Have Been Our Lot Since The Fall Of Man. But There Must Be Some Hope That We Can Rise To A Higher Level ... That Consciousness Can Evolve To A Plane More Benevolent Than Its Counterpoint Of A Universe Hardwired To Indifference.

Every Age Fraught With Discord And Danger Seems To Spawn A Leader Meant Only For That Age, A Political Giant Whose Absence, In Retrospect, Seems Inconceivable When The History Of That Age Is Written.

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It's One Of The Strangest Attributes Of This Profession That When We Writers Get Exhausted Writing One Thing, We Relax By Writing Another.

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If There Is A True Religion In The Universe, It Must Include The Truth Of Contact Or Be Forever Hollow.

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