Science & Tech Quote by David Brin

Brin’s line lands like a friendly provocation aimed at two tribes that love to police the genre: the lab-coat gatekeepers who treat STEM credentials as a passport to “real” science fiction, and the lit-world skeptics who assume SF is just gadgetry with plot holes. He grants the obvious point first - scientific training can improve plausibility, discipline, and the sheer confidence to push an idea beyond hand-waving. Then he twists the knife: some of the best practitioners couldn’t “parse a differential equation” if their lives depended on it. That last clause is doing cultural work. It punctures credential worship with a comic image of life-or-death math anxiety, reminding readers that artistry is not an SAT subject.

The subtext is a defense of SF as literature, not just technical extrapolation. Brin isn’t dismissing science; he’s reframing what “better” means. Great science fiction doesn’t merely avoid mistakes. It metabolizes science into metaphor, character pressure, moral dilemma, and worldview. The English-major advantage is fluency in voice, theme, and human contradiction - the stuff that makes an invented future feel lived-in rather than diagrammed.

Context matters: Brin is himself a scientifically trained writer, so the remark carries the authority of an insider refusing to turn the genre into a credentialed club. It’s also a quiet warning about the seductions of accuracy. Perfect equations won’t save a story that can’t make readers care. In Brin’s formulation, science is a tool, not the throne; the best SF is bilingual, translating hard ideas into hard feelings.