Cosmology and eschatology - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

''Now,'' said Arcot, looking at it [the cube he had mentally created], ''Man can do what never before was possible. From the nothingness of Space he can make anything. ''Man alone in this space is Creator and Destroyer. ''It is a high place. ''May he henceforth live up to it.'' And he looked out toward the mighty star-lit hull that had destroyed a solar system - and could create another.

- JohnW. Campbell, Jr., Invaders from the Infinite (1932)

He knew where the seesaw would stop. It would end in the very remote past, with the release of the stupendous temporal energy he had been accumulating with each of those monstrous swings. He would not witness, but he would cause the formation of the planets.

- A. E. van Vogt, ''The Seesaw'' (1941)

It came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. But therewas now no man towhom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer - by demonstration - would take care of that, too. For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program. The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, ''let there be light!'' And there was light

- Isaac Asimov, ''The Last Question'' (1956)

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet - like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment, I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist!

- Richard Matheson, The Incredible Shrinking Man (film, 1957)

What if the world isn't scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle - what if it's like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. [. . .] Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it's only soup . . .

- Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation (1959), translated by Adele Milch (1974)

The Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one. A time-consuming procedure, perhaps, but one that would never fail. The Universe itself operated on the same principle.

- Stanislaw Lem,Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose (1973)

Once there lived a certain engineer-cosmogonist who lit stars to dispel the dark.

- Stanislaw Lem, ''Uranium Earpieces'' (1965), translated by Michael Kandel (1977)

Little eggs within bigger eggs within great eggs within a megamonolith on a planetary pear within an ovoid universe, the latest cosmogony indicating that infinity has the form of a hen's fruit. God broods over the abyss and cackles every trillion years or so.

- Philip Josй Farmer, ''Riders of the PurpleWage'' (1967)

''Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape.When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. [. . .] ''No one can win against kipple,'' he said, ''except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.''

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

- Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Deep Thought: All right. The Answer to Everything . . . Two: Yes . . . ! Deep Thought: Life, the Universe, and Everything . . . One: Yes . . . ! Deep Thought: Is . . . Three: Yes . . . ! Deep Thought: Is . . . One/Two: Yes . . . !!! Deep Thought: Forty-two.

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Fourth,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1978)

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Fifth,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1978)

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Seventh,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1978)

As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy, than to create.

- Jack B. Sowards, Star Trek II: TheWrath of Khan (film, 1982)

In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . . See . . . Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination. In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of theWeight. Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and startanned shoulders the disc of theWorld rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven. Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.

- Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (1983)

In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.

- Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies (1992)

''The Constructors could have owned a universe; but it was not enough. So they challenged Finitude, and touched the Boundary of Time, and reached through that, and enabled Mind to colonize and inhabit all the many universes of the Multiplicity. But, for theWatchers of the Optimal History, even this is not sufficient; and they are seeking ways of reaching beyond, to further Orders of Infinity . . .'' ''And if they succeed? Will they rest?'' ''There is no rest. No limit. No end to the Beyond - no Boundaries which Life, and Mind, cannot challenge, and breach.''

- Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships (1995)