Science & Tech Quote by Fred Saberhagen

A deliberately mild sentence that feels less like a conviction than a raised eyebrow. Saberhagen, a science-fiction author who made a career out of imagined systems (from Berserkers to Dracula retoolings), is speaking from inside genres where “research” is both fetishized and routinely betrayed. The phrase “of considerable importance” is politely noncommittal, the kind of praise you give to a colleague’s hobby when you don’t want to argue at the dinner table. And the qualifier “in certain fields” is the tell: he’s not defending research as a moral absolute, he’s boxing it in.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the expectation that every kind of writing must justify itself with footnotes. In science and history, facts are the product; the reader arrives expecting evidence, lineage, accountability. In much of fiction, especially speculative fiction, the facts are scaffolding. They exist to make the lie believable enough to carry bigger truths: fear, ambition, power, the way institutions chew people up. Saberhagen’s careful narrowing implies a second point: outside those “certain fields,” research can become performative, a substitute for imagination, or worse, a shield against criticism (“I did my homework” as a claim to authority).

Contextually, it reads like a writer’s craft note from a mid-to-late 20th-century moment when “hard” science fiction was policing its borders and historical fiction was booming with claims of authenticity. Saberhagen’s restraint is the joke and the provocation: yes, research matters - but don’t mistake accuracy for insight, or paperwork for vision.