This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. If this goes on, this is what will happen. A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.
Business | Prediction | Time | Will | Business |
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.
Order | Prediction | Reality | Sound |
Whoever in prayer can say, Our Father, acknowledges and should feel the brotherhood of the whole race of mankind.
Come, we have a hot venison pasty to dinner. I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here. All’s Well That Ends Well, Act iv, Scene 3
O momentary grace of mortal men, which we more hunt for than the grace of God! Who builds his hope in air of your fair looks, lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, ready, with every nod, to tumble down into the fatal bowels of the deep.
Isn't there a picture that belongs in the original frame? Life [one suspects she means spiritual life] cannot die. You can explode its dynamism [the physical body] but you cannot dissipate its energy. If you suffer where life suffered, the essence that once filled the frame will take from you something to dramatize and live again.
Eternal | Experience | Knowledge | Prediction |
We need to fix the Bush prescription drug plan that subsidizes big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of senior citizens. We need to stop the oil companies from obscene profiteering, which reduces the standard of living for so many Americans. As usual, this Administration prescribes the same quack medicine for all our ailments: tax breaks for the richest Americans and the largest, most profitable corporations.
Refuse to tolerate anything less than harmony. You can have prosperity no matter what your present circumstances may be. You can have health and physical fitness. You can have a happy and joyous life. You can have a good home of your own. You can have congenial friends and comrades. You can have a full, free, joyous life, independent and untrammeled. You can become your own master or your own mistress. But to do this you must definitely seize the rudder of your own destiny and steer boldly and firmly for the port that you intend to make.
Ability | Absolute | Acquaintance | Action | Attention | Delay | Difficulty | Faith | God | Harmony | Man | Means | Mind | Need | Peace | Power | Prayer | Quiet | Struggle | Time | Truth | Will | Trial | God | Child | Think |
Eugenio Maria de Hostos (y Bonilla)
By educating women to use all their brains, men will not only be just, but will also ensure the future of a new social order in which women will apply their intelligence and warm feelings to the problems of living. Men are fools to entrust the upbringing of their sons, whom they expect to grow up to love freedom, to women who have never known freedom themselves.
Delay |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
A normal woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she, susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignominious defeat?The first general election in which all American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him.
Delay |