benfridge • read

"Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom-poets, visionaries- realists of a larger reality." "I create alternatives. I show that alternatives exist. Probably the sum total of my message to the world is that you do not have to do it one way." "I think art remains centrally important in any age, the best or the worst, because it doesn't lie. The hope it offers is not a false hope. And I think the novel is an important art because it talks about what we live by, other than bread. And I think science fiction is- well, no, not important, yet still worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life of the imagination..." “I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.” "Nature is humanity's "Other." As an Other, nature is demonized, idealized, extolicized, subordinated, objectified, and distance is lessened in a hundred thousand ways. To the extent any of us participate in this Othering, we lock ourselves out of community with the species with whom we share this world. We lock ourselves into a tiny, tiny cell that defines what we mean by "us." Solitary."