Life & Wisdom Quote by Fred Saberhagen

There’s a sly swagger in that line, the kind that treats a sprawling science-fiction mythos less like a “series” and more like a long-running pact. Saberhagen isn’t simply marking time; he’s staking a claim on endurance. “The Berserkers” aren’t presented as books on a shelf but as companions, almost co-conspirators, that have “been with me” for forty years. The phrasing blurs authorship into lived relationship, suggesting that the work has shaped him as much as he shaped it.

The subtext is also commercial and cultural, in the best genre-fiction sense: this is a promise to readers who’ve invested decades in a universe that keeps expanding. Long-form sci-fi thrives on the idea that the future is never finished, and Saberhagen’s “we’re not done yet” lands like a rallying cry against the quiet expectations of closure. It refuses the neat, prestige-novel ending; it embraces the pulp engine that keeps generating new conflicts, new angles, new reinventions.

Context matters: the Berserker stories, built around relentless killing machines, are basically an allegory for runaway violence and automated war. Saying they’re still “with” him hints at a darker resonance: the theme hasn’t aged out because the world hasn’t. What reads as authorial confidence doubles as an uneasy truth about the persistence of the very forces his fiction warns about.