Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, Preface
"To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values."
Science Fiction after 1900: from the steam man to the stars, by Brooks Landon, P 109
"Utopian and dystopian SF works regularly interrogate political and social norms, frequently, if not usually, advancing a generally libertarian philosophy that mistrusts authority in all it's official guises. And yet, for all it's trappings of iconoclasm, SF in the twentieth century has also been uncritically supportive of far too many totalizing systems of belief and has blithely accepted far too many cultural constructions as immutable aspects of reality."
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