Politics & Power Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Schmidt is making a slyly practical case for why science fiction travels: it recruits readers who are already training themselves to be tourists in the unfamiliar. The line hinges on “by the nature of the beast,” a phrase that treats SF less like a genre and more like a temperament. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys speculative premises, alien societies, and invented histories, you’ve already built a tolerance - even a hunger - for difference. International fiction doesn’t feel like homework; it feels like adjacent territory.

The subtext is also a gentle rebuke to literary parochialism. Schmidt implies that the barrier to cross-border reading isn’t translation alone; it’s curiosity. SF’s core pleasure is cognitive estrangement: stepping outside the default settings of your own world and seeing them as contingent, negotiable. Once you’ve accepted that a planet can run on three suns or a society can be built around telepathy, the idea that a novel from Nigeria or Japan might use different social cues becomes less intimidating, more enticing.

Context matters here: Schmidt came up through mid-century American magazine SF, a scene that could be both outward-looking and stubbornly insular. His point splits the difference. He’s not claiming SF readers are morally superior; he’s saying their entertainment has trained them for cross-cultural reading. The kicker is “closest available example”: other nations are framed as the nearest form of alien contact we’re likely to get, a neat inversion that turns global literature into the most realistic science fiction.