Politics & Power Quote by David Brin

Brin is quietly arguing against the cult of the master plan. The line reads like craft advice, but it’s also a worldview: fiction as exploration, not engineering. By saying he “inevitably discover[s]” things, he frames the novel as a terrain with its own laws. The writer isn’t a god installing meaning; he’s an investigator following clues. That stance matters coming from a science fiction author associated with big systems - politics, technology, sociological ripple effects. He’s insisting that even in genre built on worldbuilding blueprints, the human mess has veto power.

The subtext is a defense of uncertainty as a tool, not a weakness. “Vital” does heavy lifting: discovery isn’t a happy accident, it’s the engine that produces texture - the stray detail that makes a character’s past feel lived-in, the unexpected motive that makes an intrigue feel political rather than plotty. His phrasing, “I would not prejudice it,” is tellingly legalistic, like he’s safeguarding due process for the story. Over-planning becomes a kind of jury tampering: you start forcing testimony to fit your outline.

Contextually, this lands in the long-running argument between outliners and improvisers, but Brin gives it an ethical spin. “Deciding too much in advance” isn’t just inefficient; it’s a way of limiting what the book can reveal about power and history. In a genre obsessed with foreknowledge - prophecy, prediction, algorithms - Brin makes a modest, almost radical claim: the future of a narrative should be allowed to surprise its own author.