Edmund Cooper

Edmund Cooper (April 30, 1926 – March 11, 1982) was an English poet and prolific writer of speculative fiction, romances, technical essays, several detective stories, and a children's book. These were published under his own name and several pen names.

The Uncertain Midnight (1958)

 * Only ideals are dangerous.


 * Perhaps justified violence is better than peace at any price.


 * It is an inflexible law that all living things must seek to dominate their environment.


 * There is only the eternal serial moment of now. It contains the total pattern, the complete history.


 * But it may be that there is happiness in the very things we rejected - in work and responsibility. In the rearing of children and in the challenge of permanent love.

Seed of Light (1959)

 * It is the nature of men to act negatively but to dream and hope positively.


 * It is not in the nature of man to accept permanent failure.


 * He who expects little is rarely disappointed.


 * All fanaticism springs from the religious impulse.


 * All living things sustain each other. All living things depend upon death not as an end, an absolute completion, but as a beginning of a new rhythm, a way of fulfillment in passing on the restless force of life.


 * For death is only a loss of radiance, and birth is only the beginning of a separate journey.


 * But in adversity, intelligence alone cannot sustain hope. Ultimately, hope can be sustained only by finding purpose in adversity, by imposing a pattern on the fortuitous disasters of existence. Human beings, if force to it, will compromise their intelligence to preserve their hope.


 * For mankind may survive and live without machines, and still be civilised. But without compassion, the human race can only elaborate upon the futile cunning and the barren intelligence of the great apes.


 * Thus, ultimately, there never could be an absolute end; just as there never could have been an absolute beginning. There could only be a continuous unfolding.

Transit (1964)

 * There is no other god but life. Life is the only holy thing. And when that goes that is the death of God.


 * There is no acceptable true image.


 * But no one can be immune to the laws of chance.

All Fools' Day (1966)

 * In a fantastic world, the fantastic had become merely ordinary.


 * Cultures and societies consumed each other, as well as animals and men.


 * The real struggle is between order and anarchy.


 * But then history was made by fools.


 * Life itself has become ludicrous.

A Far Sunset (1967)

 * What is god but an extension of the ego - a sort of megalomania by proxy?


 * Men who are afraid live longer.


 * To be with child does not diminish beauty, but changes the shape of beauty.


 * Courage has many faces.

Five to Twelve (1968)

 * Those who look for death have to wait patiently till death finds those who look.


 * Mankind has never been renowned for accepting logical solutions to its most serious problems. As a rule, the degre of logicality of solutions seemed to vary inversely with the urgency or seriousness of the problems.

Sea-horse in the Sky (1969)

 * Destiny knows no favorites.


 * But it is better to be destroyed on strange frontiers than to live in a prison of ignorance and fear.


 * Only the absurd could have any bearing on reality.

The Last Continent (1970)

 * The colour of the skin is less important than the spirit wich moves it.


 * And yet to be without hope is almost to be without sanity.

Kronk (1970)

 * Self-pity, a destroyer of perspective.


 * And he who loves last loves loudest.

The Overman Culture (1971)

 * There is no truth but untruth. There is no reason but unreason.


 * In the country of the mad, the sane man is crazy.


 * Behind the apparent unreason there is reason.


 * I am rebelling against imprisonment, I am rebelling against tyranny of the mind, I am rebelling against a collection of machines with interchangeable faces. Above all, I am rebelling against my own ignorance and your deliberate deception.


 * In some way the material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a vision.


 * Without mankind machines are nothing.

The Tenth Planet (1973)

 * I believe our only hope of immortality lies in our actions, in what we do to and for others, and in our children.


 * The mad can make their own laws.


 * The journey is what matters.


 * When one flowers dies, another is born.

The cloud walker (1973)

 * There comes a time when a men desires to rise above fear.


 * Historically, the developement of machines had amplified man's ability to destroy.


 * A man must either fall or rise in adversity.


 * On earth there are frontiers, in the sky there are none.

Prisonner of Fire (1974)

 * But some children have clearer vision than adults.


 * Even you must appreciate that to destroy the personnality while preserving the body is simply another kind of death.


 * How does one objectively define madness ?