Time & Perspective Quote by Fred Saberhagen

Saberhagen’s line lands with the calm of someone who’s watched tech panics come and go, and refuses to grant the digital future the drama it desperately wants. “My gut feeling” is doing quiet work: it’s not a manifesto, it’s an author’s lived prediction, grounded in habit, in infrastructure, in the stubborn physicality of how culture actually circulates. He’s signaling that media revolutions rarely erase what came before; they rearrange status and convenience.

The phrase “paper and ink” isn’t nostalgic poetry so much as a reminder of material advantages we still undervalue: ownership that can’t be revoked by a licensing change, readability that doesn’t depend on battery life, and a distribution system that’s already everywhere. “Substantial quantities” pushes back against the then-common narrative of total replacement. He’s not defending the smell of books. He’s defending the persistence of a technology that already solved a lot of problems.

The pivot - “though certainly” - acknowledges inevitability without surrender. Saberhagen concedes formats will multiply, but he refuses the simplistic binary of print versus digital. The subtext is a pragmatic pluralism: books are not a single object but a delivery mechanism for attention, authority, and permanence. In context, coming from a science fiction writer steeped in imagined futures, the restraint is the point. He’s warning that the future is usually messier than our press releases: additive, not apocalyptic.