Art & Creativity Quote by David Brin

Story first, sermon last: Brin lays down a craft credo that doubles as a quiet rebuke to science fiction’s worst habit - mistaking big ideas for finished fiction. The line is built like a countdown, and that structure is the point. “First duty” and “Second” sound like commandments; “Only third” lands with a little sting, demoting the genre’s sacred cow. He’s not anti-idea. He’s anti-idea-as-alibi.

“Gripping yarn” is deliberately old-fashioned phrasing, a nod to pulp pleasure and momentum. It signals humility: the writer’s job is to hold attention, not to preen. Then he pivots to “credible characters,” and the verb choice matters. They don’t just think or act; they “make you feel what they feel.” Brin is arguing for emotional credibility as the delivery system for thought. If the reader doesn’t buy the human core, the concept reads like a TED Talk in costume.

The subtext is professional and political. As a working SF novelist coming out of the post-Golden Age ecosystem (and into the era of cyberpunk and prestige genre fiction), Brin is staking his claim: speculative fiction earns legitimacy by doing the basic novelistic work, not by waving its intelligence around. “Idea” arrives last because it’s the easiest part for clever writers to fetishize - and the easiest way to lose readers. In Brin’s hierarchy, theme is dessert, not dinner: it should linger, but it can’t be the only thing on the plate.