Science & Tech Quote by Dwight Schultz

Schultz frames science fiction less as escapism than as rehearsal, a low-stakes training montage for a high-stakes future. Coming from an actor, that metaphor lands with extra bite: performance is practice for reality, and sci-fi is culture’s dress rehearsal for the unknown. The line “whoever they may be” is doing the real work. It widens the target beyond little green men. “Them” can be extraterrestrials, yes, but it also quietly covers foreigners, rivals, new technologies, even the next version of ourselves. The ambiguity is a pressure valve: you can talk about fear of difference without naming the difference.

The intent isn’t to predict alien contact so much as to argue for imagination as civic infrastructure. Sci-fi lets audiences test emotional responses - curiosity, paranoia, awe, aggression - in a sandbox. You get to watch a first contact scenario play out, then notice which characters you instinctively side with: the diplomat or the soldier, the scientist or the conspiracy guy. That self-audit is the genre’s hidden curriculum.

Context matters: Schultz is best known for roles in genre-adjacent pop culture (most famously as “Howling Mad” Murdock on The A-Team, and as voice talent), where fandom and speculation aren’t side effects; they’re the product. In that ecosystem, science fiction becomes a shared language for processing rapid change. The quote flatters the genre, but it also makes a pragmatic claim: stories are where a society tries on its future before it has to live it.