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nothing, and spoon-feed him mush? The challenge and the fun come in handling all the above ideas and materials in such a way as to predict how perversely or how well man will use himself, and therefore his mechanical extensions, in the coming time of our lives.
It is both exciting and disconcerting for a writer to discover that man's machines are indeed symbols of his own most secret cravings and desires, extra hands put out to touch and reinterpret the world. The machines themselves are empty gloves into which a hand, either cold and excessively bony, or warm, full-fleshed, and gentle, can be inserted. The hand is always the hand of man, and the hand of man can be good or evil, while the gloves themselves remain amoral.
The problem of good and evil fascinates, then, especially when it is to be found externalized and purified in the thousands of semi-robots we are using and will use in the coming century. Our atomic knowledge destroys cancer or men. Our airplanes carry passengers or jellied gasoline bombs. The hairline, the human, choice is there. Before us today we see the aluminum and steel and uranium chess pieces which the interested science-fiction writer can hope to move about, trying to guess how man will play out the game. (. . .)
Over and above everything, the writer in this field has a sense of being confronted by dozens of paths that move among the thousand mirrors of a carnival maze, seeing his society imaged and re-imaged and distorted by the light thrown back at him. Without moving anything but his typewriter, that immensely dependable Time Machine, the writer can take those paths and examine those billion images. Where are we going? Well, first let us see where we've been. And let us ask ourselves what we are at this very hour. Fortified with this knowledge, nebulous at most, the writer's imagination selects the first path.
Ray Bradbury, "Day After Tomorrow: Why Science Fiction?," Nation, 2 May 1953, pp. 36465
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J. B. Priestley
His stories use the familiar properties of science fictionfabulous travel in space and time, wars between planets, weird beings from beyond the solar systembut not in the usual routine fashion. He is concerned not with gadgets but with men's feelings. He creates imaginatively; and it may be assumed that he is not merely turning out stuff for

 
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