Time & Perspective Quote by Alan Dean Foster

"There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field"

Alan Dean Foster, Author

About this Quote

Abundance is not a victory lap; its just a bigger room with louder echoes. Alan Dean Foster, a career-long working writer with one foot in fandom and the other in mass-market publishing, lands a dry, almost bureaucratic punchline: more science fiction on the shelves inevitably means more dreck on the shelves. The joke is statistical, but the barb is cultural. SF has spent decades arguing about legitimacy and “golden ages,” and Foster sidesteps the prestige fight by treating the genre like an ecosystem: scale changes the noise floor before it changes the signal.

The subtext is a quiet warning against mistaking visibility for quality. In an era of expanding imprints, media tie-ins, self-publishing, and algorithm-fed recommendation loops, “more” becomes a kind of propaganda. Readers feel overwhelmed; writers feel pressured to ship; publishers hedge by chasing trends. Foster’s line punctures the idea that the market is a meritocracy that reliably elevates the best. If anything, the flood can bury it.

His final move - punting judgment to “future historians of the field” - reads modest on the surface, but its also a refusal to play critic from inside the factory. Canon formation takes time: it requires rereading, influence, and endurance, not launch-week buzz. Foster’s intent is less to lament the bad than to remind you that “good SF” is always partially invisible in the moment, and that the genre’s real scoreboard is longevity, not volume.

Quote Details

Topic	Writing
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Alan Add to List

About the Author

Alan Dean Foster (born November 18, 1946) is a Author from USA.

21 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly"

Alan Dean Foster, Author

"An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

"When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing"

George Stephen, Businessman

"I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion"

Stanley Schmidt, Writer

"A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas"

Frederik Pohl, Writer

Frederik Pohl

"I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection"

John Sladek, Author

"And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction"

Stanley Schmidt, Writer

"And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature"

Jerry Pournelle, Journalist

"I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday"

Jack L. Chalker, Author

"There are so many good authors; there's no shortage of them"

Jeanne Calment, Celebrity

"SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off"

Larry Niven, Writer

"Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF"

Dan Simmons, Author

"I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once"

Donald Judd, Artist

Donald Judd

"What I feel bad about is not having published very much in the last few years"

Ben Nicholson, Artist

Ben Nicholson

"There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though - it's been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments"

Stanley Schmidt, Writer

"Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile"

Rudy Rucker, Scientist

"What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones"

Stanley Schmidt, Writer

"Maybe some of today's papers have too many 'feel-good' features, but there is a lot of good news out there"

Ben Bradlee, Editor

"Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas"

Orson Scott Card, Writer

"I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published"

Greg Egan, Scientist