Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanley Schmidt

Schmidt’s line has the calm, editorial cadence of someone trying to name a structural problem without turning it into a moral melodrama. The “Of course” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: he’s framing bias as the default setting, not an aberration. Writers “think about those things” (a coy placeholder for politics, ethics, futures, the human) through the lenses they inherited. In science fiction, a genre that prides itself on imagination, that admission lands like a quiet rebuke: your rocket ships may be novel, but your assumptions can be antique.

The subtext sits in the hedges. “Almost certain,” “hard to deny,” “for whatever reasons,” “a lot” - Schmidt is both acknowledging an imbalance and softening the claim to keep it discussable in a community that can get defensive about canon and gatekeeping. It’s less an accusation than an institutional note: if most SF writers are Anglo or European, then the genre’s default future will keep reproducing Anglo-European preoccupations as if they’re neutral. The “for whatever reasons” is especially telling; it gestures toward publishing pipelines, language markets, education, fandom demographics, and historical access - causes that are real and mundane, which makes them harder to argue away.

Context matters: Schmidt, long associated with SF’s magazine ecosystem, is speaking from inside the machine that selects, edits, and amplifies voices. The intent isn’t to scold individual writers; it’s to nudge the field toward self-awareness. He’s making a case that representation isn’t cosmetic. It determines what counts as plausible, what counts as “human,” and whose future gets to feel inevitable.