Life & Wisdom Quote by Jack L. Chalker

“Decadence is wonderful” is a deliberately perverse little slogan, the kind that flips a moral warning label into a sales pitch. Coming from Jack L. Chalker, a science-fiction writer fascinated by transformation, appetite, and the slippery politics of desire, it reads less like a defense of champagne-soaked excess than a genre-savvy provocation: what respectable culture calls “decadent” is often just pleasure that refuses to be useful.

The sentence works because it’s blunt to the point of insolence. “Decadence” is a loaded term, historically deployed by gatekeepers to shame the “soft” end of civilization: luxury, erotic experimentation, aesthetic indulgence, anything that looks like people enjoying themselves without permission. By pairing it with “wonderful,” Chalker stages a micro-rebellion against that scolding. The subtext is: if the world is already compromised, why pretend purity is the only moral posture? Better to claim the sensation, the color, the forbidden flourish.

There’s also an SF undercurrent here. Decadence is frequently coded as decline in speculative fiction: decadent empires, baroque elites, decadent technology. Chalker’s twist suggests that decline can be thrilling, even liberating, because it breaks the rules that supposedly keep society “healthy.” It’s a line that invites the reader to question who benefits from the anti-decadence narrative. Often it’s the same people selling austerity as virtue while quietly hoarding the pleasures they condemn.