‚Seems like when Ah was a child ’round here Ah heard de folks pickin’ de guitar 
and singin’ sings to dat effect.« 
Dat’s right. If Ah was you, Ah’d drop down dere and see. It’s liable to do you 
a lotuh good. « 
From: Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), 
Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2008, 54-55. 
»Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. 
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usu- 
ally charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and 
by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, Clairvoyants, 
and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. 
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the 
Rand corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t 
recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none 
of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what 
you're like—what’s going on—what the weather is now, today, this moment, the 
rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what novelists say. 
But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All thev can tell you is what 
they have seen and heard in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep 
and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. 
‚The truth against the world!«—Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their 
braver moment, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go 
aboutit in peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, 
and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these 
fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when 
they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That’s the truth! 
They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies, They may de- 
scribe the Marshalsea Prison, which was a real place, or the battle of Borodino, 
which really was fought, or the process of cloning, which really takes place in 
laboratories, or the deterioration of a personality, which is described in real text- 
books of psychology, and so on. This weight of verifiable place-event-phenom- 
enon-behavior makes the reader forget that he is reading a pure invention, a 
history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region, the au- 
thor’s mind. In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe 
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