The Best of Science Fiction 12

Few books today are forgivable. Black on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social 'reality'. Around us are 'pseudo events', to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real, and even as beautiful. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not ...

What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism — can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?

The requirement of the present, the failure of the past, is the same: to provide a thoroughly self-conscious and self-critical human account of man.

(R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise)