Black Science Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Who originates the latest slang terms that are, seemingly overnight, known to every black youth across the country? — Donald Jeffries

It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. — H.P. Lovecraft

They say it's always darkest before the dawn and it was pitch black by the time I arrived at the Marriott. However I still had a few bullets left for my deadbeat uncle that tried to stab me in the back. — Angel Ramon Medina

When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person ...
What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking
whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people? — Octavia E. Butler

Relax," the woman said. "It's just me."
"Just you?" Hale asked with heavy irony, remembering the black leather and predator's eyes with a stab of heat. Dangerous beauty had always been his downfall.
"I'm watching your back."
"Sure you are," he snorted. Beauty or not, he wasn't stupid enough to trust. Screw, sure. Trust, no way. — Michelle O'Leary

The next evening she brought him the Royal. It was an office model from an era when such things as electric typewriters, color TVs, and touch-tone telephones were only science fiction. It was as black and as proper as a pair of high-button shoes. Glass panels were set into the sides, revealing the machine's levers, springs, ratchets, and rods. A steel return lever, dull with disuse, jutted to one side like a hitchhiker's thumb. The roller was dusty, its hard rubber scarred and pitted. — Stephen King

There was a period that black film had no chance of making it in Hollywood. So, people just made the made the statements that they wanted to make. Whether it was a science fiction film or whatever, b/c they were just making movie for themselves. Then there was a period where people were creating projects as their Hollywood audition 'pieces'. I feel that today we are moving back to the era where we all have our own voices. — Reginald Hudlin

I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it. — Wesley Snipes

I guess I should thank you for totally making my morning. It's not every day a stranger notices my perspiration level.
- Dr. Jeri Asher (BLACK MARIAH - A Calling) — Richard Finney

Brea watched the other Jaren, the Jaren she wasn't sure she wanted to know, slip through the cracks of his face. He was like the changelings in that Dream Box game he was so invested in, Bladescape. Her own interested mask, the one she was supposed to wear, must have slanted a bit around the eyes because then the other Jaren, her Jaren, was back. She watched his dimples puddle in the black of his beard as his mind fumbled for something to say. And this impromptu self-modification, here at the monitoring station at the job where she'd made such a fool of herself, was the closest thing to love that Brea Morgen had ever known. — Daniel Pike

In Hamilton's The Universe Wreckers ... it was in that novel that, for the first time, I learned Neptune had a satellite named Triton ... It was from The Drums of Tapajos that I first learned there was a Mato Grosso area in the Amazon basin. It was from The Black Star Passes and other stories by John W. Campbell that I first heard of relativity.
The pleasure of reading about such things in the dramatic and fascinating form of science fiction gave me a push toward science that was irresistible. It was science fiction that made me want to be a scientist strongly enough to eventually make me one.
That is not to say that science fiction stories can be completely trusted as a source of specific knowledge ... However, the misguidings of science fiction can be unlearned. Sometimes the unlearning process is not easy, but it is a low price to pay for the gift of fascination over science. — Isaac Asimov

As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.' — Tananarive Due

The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen. — Kate Wilhelm

Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce. — Octavia E. Butler

The cool thing for me is, I go to a lot of conventions - a lot of science fiction conventions like Comic-Con - and there are always a lot of attendants of color. And I think some people believe that black people or people of color are not into science fiction or hero shows or genre shows. — J. August Richards

The front edge of the shockwave impacts the earth and you're both shoved to your backs against the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot, and then crushed into oblivion as the Earth, along with every celestial body of your solar system, is disintegrated into tiny shards and then sucked unceremoniously into the resulting black hole. — Daniel Keidl

The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate. — Grant Morrison

Man leave the past in the past. That's where it belongs. The trouble with addicts is that they carry bad memories around with them - like old luggage. And in that luggage that's where they carry their blueprint for living. You got to decide what's worth keeping, and then set the rest of it on the curb for the garbage.
-Joseph — Valjeanne Jeffers

There's no point running anyway. In t-minus ten minutes, you will have no where to run to."

Quinn tensed at the triumphant look in his eyes. ". . .what have you done?"

"I have entered launch codes in the computer. In exactly ten minutes, Alpha Star 9 will be a black stain in the middle of Utah."

Quinn's lips part in shock.

"Yes," said. Dr. Zorgone in amusement. "Dramatic gasp! — Ash Gray

Incase the title was misleading, this is the story of Qorth. He was an alien, but he was more normal, more boring, more goofy, and more ho-hum than any human I'd ever known . . . to the point that I sometimes wonder if he was really even an alien. To be fair, he did have "magical" otherworldly powers and some weird traits, like pointed ears. It rained when he was sad. His eyes were solid black, which really creeped me out in the beginning but, eh, I got used to it. He had weird tastes in food, like he would put ketchup on pancakes, and animals were sock puppets to him. The night I found him, it was the animals who led me to him. — Ash Gray

RIDE A WHITE SWAN"
"Ride it on out like a bird in the skyway,
Ride it on out like you were a bird,
Fly it all out like an eagle in a sunbeam,
Ride it all out like you were a bird.
Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old days
Wear a tall hat and a Tattooed gown
Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane,
Wear your hair long,babe,you can't go wrong.
Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead,
Say a few spells and baby,there you go,
Take a black cat and sit it on your shoulder,
And in the morning you'll know all you know.
Wear a tall hat like the druid in the old days
Wear a tall hat and a Tattooed gown
Ride a white swan like the people of the Beltane,
Wear your hair long, babe ,you can't go wrong.
Da di di da, da di di da — Marc Bolan

You people do not have to live like this!" the man pleaded. "We are humans, made in the image of God. No machine has the right to order us around." The man reached inside his box, no bigger than a foot square, and took out a small black book. "Here is the truth. Read it!"
Before anyone could act, one of the Sentries aimed its red eye at the babbling man, and shot out a deadly energy ray. With a final shout of defiance, the man fell to the ground, dead. The contents of his container spilling out onto the spaceport's floor. Marcellus looked down at the items, so precious to the man: they were copies of The Koran and The Bible. — Donald Allen Kirch

Lieutenant Mortas is the black sheep of the family--I thought you knew that. — Henry V. O'Neil

Struggling transforms her captor into a Chinese finger trap. She's suffocating. Sucking in air without relief. Her lungs expand. Contract. Expand. They fill with lies and broken promises. With despair and lost hope. Each inhale is empty. Invisible hands reach into her body and constrict around her windpipe. She watches her friends collapse like supernovae, their cognizance disappearing into a black hole. A black hole she's quickly cascading into. The dark consumes, bleeds into her vision. She blinks. Catches icy blue eyes peeking out from the shadows. — Laura Kreitzer

All I see is my father's tax money being wasted on shooting satellite pictures of South America like you guys work for the Travel Channel.
Todd Dooley (BLACK MARIAH - A Calling) — Richard Finney

Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it. — Philip K. Dick

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism. — Leonard Susskind

I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I'm sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like 'Black Hawk Down,' and I could also totally do horror. — Neill Blomkamp

If one could only discover the unwritten bases of black magic and apply formulae to them, we would find that they were merely another form of science ... perhaps less advance, perhaps more. — Charles Beaumont

At Snortin' Reformatory, a notorious Washington, D.C. jail located in the northern Virginia suburbs, The Afro-Anarchists were being thrown into a cell. It was a situation that the three of them, like many young black males in the D.C. area, had long ago come to expect as a rite of passage.
As the door slammed shut behind them, Bucktooth spoke. "Man, Phosphate, they didn't read us our rights or nothin'."
"Yeah, Phos," Fontaine chimed in, "I didn't think they had to beat us, neither. And whoever heard of being charged with singing too loud and off-key in a public establishment? I don't believe there is no kind of law for that shit. — Donald Jeffries

Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There's no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it. — Laura Kreitzer

I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about losers on motorcycles- this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten. — Stephen King

On the far side of the bay was the command station that controlled the door, which was currently semi-open. Rather than the normal closed maw of steel, there was a network of pulsing gold veins crisscrossing the gaping mouth of black - a nitrogen membrane keeping the molecular air contained and pressurized while allowing aircraft to pass through. — April Adams

He slept still in the induced coma his doctors had kept him in since he arrived. She could see the bruises, see the healing wound of the burn that stretched over his side. She reached out a hand, hovered just above the field and traced the path of the yellow, black and angry red of his healing flesh.
She had done that to him. — Mary Brock Jones

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes ... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets.
"Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now. — P.C. Hodgell

Find your self love. Find that precious thing inside you that
makes you want to live. And when you've found it, hold on to it with one
hand, and use the other to claw your way back home.
-Ripple — Valjeanne Jeffers