Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on Characters Who ‘Break Through to Another Reality’)

“People are drawn to stories in which characters do break through to another reality, because it is a universal experience to look at the world and go, Is this all there is? Or even if this is all there is, do I actually understand it? Are there clues and keys that would give me a new understanding? The glory of fiction is that I am lying to you. It's the same deal a good stage magician makes: You are going to be lied to.” — English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theater, and films Neil Gaiman, quoted in “Soapbox: The Columnists—WSJ. Asks Five Luminaries To Weigh in on Single Topic; This Month: Breakthroughs,” WSJ. Magazine, November 2020

(Photo of Neil Gaiman taken at the 2007 Scream Awards, Oct. 19, 2007, by pinguino k from North Hollywood.)

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on How Speculative Fiction Is Actually About the Present)

“People think, wrongly, that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t…What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future, but the present. Taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 and What Science Fiction Is and Does,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

Gaiman references Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in his essay, but perhaps a better example of the speculative fiction genre is 1984. (In fact, George Orwell came up with the title by reversing the last two digits of the year in which he wrote the novel: 1948.)

The image accompanying this post comes from the movie adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian vision, released in, appropriately enough, 1984, starring John Hurt (pictured here) as Winston Smith.

The key to Orwell’s nightmare comes from this quotation from the novel: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on Fairy Tales and Dragons)

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”― English fiction writer and screenwriter Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2012)

(Photo of Neil Gaiman taken at the 2007 Scream Awards, Oct. 19, 2007, by pinguino k from North Hollywood.)