Science Fiction Quotes by Frederik Pohl, Leigh Bardugo, Raymond E. Feist, David Brin, William Gibson, Kate Wilhelm and many others.
People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
I started reading fantasy and science fiction and writing fantasy and science fiction when I was – when I started junior high school.
Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I’ve had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I’ll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I’d like to get it finished some day.
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I’ve had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam… and I’m not happy to be right in all of those cases.
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
And I desperately needed books that would take me out of my environment and show me a world where being smart and brave and prepared was more important than being cute or cheerful or knowing the right thing to say. And that’s what science fiction and fantasy gave me.
Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction.
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne’s story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.
Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don’t exist.
From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity.
Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It’s a way to understand how the world will look in the future.
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it’s why I’ve never re-visited that area because I feel I’ve done it.
Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they’re both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
Something like ‘Alien,’ that was not so easy. If there’s any genre I wouldn’t mind not having to do anymore, it would be science fiction. It’s just all to do with the toys, and there’s so much hanging around.
As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction – indeed, it’s a key part of a great deal of science fiction.
True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction–don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.
In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn’t see at Woolworth’s. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction … sometimes a book a day.
With science fiction there’s endless possibilities.
The science behind Interstellar is interesting, because some of it is absolutely real astrophysics and orbital mechanics, some of it is theoretical physics, and some of it is completely Hollywood. When a science fiction movie is based on plausible science, it’s really good.
Science fiction without the science just becomes, you know, sword and sorcery, basically stories about heroism and not much more.
I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
I think that what made people accept Starbuck as a woman was that she was just such an interesting character. I think that once people put their guard down and their preconceived notions of what the show is supposed to be and just allowed it to really be good science fiction.
There’s no one ‘right’ way of making a science fiction movie; there’s no one way of making any kind of movie, really!
I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it’s less good than what I do, there’s no point in reading it, if it’s better than what I do it makes me depressed
I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines we’re creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Only when my ‘Punktown’-based stories began seeing print did I demonstrate my proclivity for blurring the borders between horror, science fiction, and other genres.
I do enjoy reading some science fiction.
Science fiction works best when it stimulates debate.
Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: ‘There is change. Look, today’s fantastic story is tomorrow’s fact.
My most memorable science fiction experience was Star Wars and seeing R2D2 and C3PO. I fell in love with those robots.
I love science fiction – always have.
I think you can get away with being a bit more political in science fiction.
The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
Sci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it’s more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.
It’s funny because when I was growing up, I was really into science fiction and fantasy as a kid. And, when I first became a screenwriter, I ended up really just doing historical drama and non-fiction based stuff, like Band of Brothers and stuff that didn’t get made, but was also non-fiction.
The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I’d call science fiction. You feel like you’ve been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle 60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it’s a very small percentage of the total. That’s been changing in the last few years.
As a fan of science fiction and as a kid who loves monsters, science fiction movies and this, that and the other, there’s no real way to make a career out of that. Especially when I grew up.
And from, you know, small ideas, bigger ideas emerge. So we’re starting with suborbital space flights and we’ll then go into orbital space flights and, you know, maybe one day we’ll send people on a one-way voyage into the depths of space as per the science fiction trips.
There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make sense: ‘Science fiction is anything published as science fiction.’
History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.
I quite enjoy science fiction.
Science-fiction … can be defined as: Imaginative extrapolation of true natural phenomena, existing now, or likely to exist in the future.
While I’m a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it’s the real universe that calls to me.
The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
The film is therefore a form of science fiction, in which humans, beasts and machines are on the verge of extinction – ‘sacred motors’ linked together by a common fate and solidarity, slaves to an increasingly virtual world. A world from which visible machines, real experiences and actions are gradually disappearing.
Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.
There’s no difference between science and science fiction.
With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.
As a fellow science fiction author, Heinlein largely raised me, and I resent it when some folks lazily dismiss Heinlein as a ‘right winger’ or even ‘fascist.’
I happen to be one of those rare actors that actually loves very intelligent and well-acted science fiction.
In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It’s so schizophrenic.
Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.
I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don’t tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards. When I was younger, those kinds of comments bothered me, but eventually got to a point where I realized I wasn’t going to change who I was.
Science fiction writers aren’t in the prediction business; they’re in the speculation business, using ‘hasn’t happened’ or ‘hasn’t happened yet’ to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.
Most people assume wrongly that science fiction is a male-based genre, when, in fact, there are far more women who tune into sci-fi than anyone expects.
I am, of comics I was never as big of a fan as I probably could have been I suppose but I’m definitely a fan of science fiction fantasy. My interests were in fantasy more than comics growing up.
The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won’t walk backwards. A horror fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won’t walk backwards because he knows he’ll step on the cat.
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought ‘I can’t wait for the future when the special effects are good’ to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory — horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene — and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.
Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you’re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don’t bother to read.
Probably the most formative experience was reading the ‘Foundation’ trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn’t the first science fiction I had ever read, but it’s something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.
I hate science fiction.
I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.
Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That’s attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.
I wasn’t a big science-fiction fan growing up. But I loved Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes. Both came into play on ‘The X-Files.’
I think when science fiction is at its worst, it’s just spaceships flying around shooting at each other. There has to be a lot more going on than that… science fiction is about exploring new worlds and new ideas, not about ray guns and action, necessarily.
The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
‘Dasavatharam’ is science fiction, a multi-crore budgeted film worth Rs 50 to 60 crore and ahead of its time.
Yeah I loved, as a kid growing up, I loved science-fiction.
A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.
Extra dimensional theories are sometimes considered science fiction with equations. I think that’s a wrong attitude. I think extra dimensions are with us, they are with us to stay, and they entered physics a long time ago. They are not going to go away.
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.
First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.
God, how that stings! I’ve spent a lifetime loving science fiction and now I find that you must expect nothing of something that’s just science fiction.
I was always attracted to science fiction movies.
Theres two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once youve read, you never look at the world the same way again.
I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about “outsiderdom” – one of the themes I am most interested in.
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
I took a great joy with inventing new kinds of mechanisms. I invented new kinds of machines. I’ve been a student of science fiction for a long, long time, and I’m very well-versed in science fact and science fiction.
Farscape is not what you call hard science fiction.
Science fiction is not quirky anymore; we live in a futuristic world now.
My brother is a scientist. He’s a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world.
Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
Science fiction fans are great, but they just aren’t the same as groupies.
I tend more towards what some people call literary science fiction, but what I mean by that is that it is full of interesting language, experimentation, and ideas.
I think we tried to make a film [Moon] that was about human beings as opposed to going from one special effects set piece to the next one, which is what a lot of science fiction films these days do.
Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.
‘Altered Carbon’ is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there – a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.
I don’t read Science Fiction.
My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’ It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.
When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don’t extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.
New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.
When I started publishing – my first novel came out in 1990 – there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it’s the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. …Science fiction is central to everything we’ve ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don’t know what they’re talking about.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
I’d always wanted the show to be more reality based science fiction, something along the lines of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I consider to be the classic science fiction film.
Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it’s being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we’d all be too close to.
Maybe the search for life shouldn’t restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.
One of the most interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is the way that the genres can offer different perspectives on matters to do with the body, the mind, medical technology, and the way we live our lives.
I’m not a science fiction writer, I’m a physicist. These are scientists who are making the future in their laboratories.
All the science fiction I loved as a kid was holding up a mirror to society and warning us about the need for course correction.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today – but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That’s the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don’t talk about football or anything like that.
I enjoy watching movies that are high concept or science fiction or have supernatural elements, like ‘2:22’ has.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
I realized that for fantasy and science fiction, especially from my youth, white was the default. Luke Skywalker was in the lead, or even if you were a hobbit, you’re going to be white. That was an extremely old-fashioned, obviously really narrow-minded way to look at things.
Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.
A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.
Horror is one of the few genres – romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind – that’s all emotion-driven. It’s not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It’s irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.
Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
The range of my interests in science fiction – it really does run a gamut.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
I am a conventional science fiction author. But that said, once your work is published, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the readers and they will derive all sorts of interpretations.
Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.
Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.
To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.
[Social] science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance on human beings.
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You’ll note there’s no science in it. It’s a kind of grim fantasy.
With ‘White Light,’ I had just finished watching ‘Under the Skin’ and was really obsessed with the idea of science fiction presented as normality.
The nice thing about ‘Futurama’ for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction – although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff.
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
There’s a long relationship between science fiction and the ‘novel of ideas,’ and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.
The real universe is always one step beyond logic.
Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.
I used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.
I’ve always been interested in science fiction
We have ‘Doctor Who’ references on ‘Futurama,’ but we have a lot of science fiction references that I don’t get; but in the staff we have experts on ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’
In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.
By serializing two novels in ‘Analog,’ the world’s No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I’ve had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.
Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.
I think there’s always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn’t.
In ‘Nier Automata’, the protagonists are androids, not humans, and that’s very common in a Science Fiction story.
I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain.
Most fiction says you may or may not be alive tomorrow; science fiction talks often about the future.
I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I’ve been on happen to be science fiction genre.
‘The Devil in the Dark’ impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today’s politicians have yet to learn.
I’m a big genre fan. I’m a big science fiction nerd and horror film nerd. I’m obsessed with Pam Grier. I wanted to be her for all of my teenage years.
In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it’s aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you’ll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.
That’s what I always liked about science fiction – you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.
People as me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it’s done well, it’s not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, ‘2001,’ for example, or the first ‘Matrix.’ But it takes someone who’s got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.
Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction.
Labels like ‘Chinese Science Fiction’ or ‘Western Science Fiction’ summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.
The most visceral science fiction always takes place in the past and focuses on the humdrum
If you look at the films that I’ve done generally, you would probably get an idea of what I’m most interested in, and if ever I do something unusual like a science fiction film or an action film or a comedy or something, then that to me feels like a step to the side to do something different.
My love of science fiction comes from the idea of being able to explore ideas and concepts to an either logical or illogical extreme.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
I was clasified as a ‘Science Fiction’ writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.
Science fiction can be exciting and very gripping, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the universe in which we live.
It’s often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science – it’s far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
Science fiction is something I never understood.
I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it’s always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
I’ve called science fiction ‘reality ahead of schedule’
The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.
Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.
Fantasy and science fiction are my comfort spot.
And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren’t always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design – the machine will itself take over in making further steps.
Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it’s just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.
Some people say they’re gathering DNA. Perhaps they’re gathering it for the future when the human race is stronger or weaker, who knows. That’s science fiction and mere speculation.
As a science fiction fan, the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award mean a lot to me.
As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first ‘Star Wars’ movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.
When ‘Blade Runner’ came out, and especially, even actually when ‘Alien’ came out, it kind of changed how all science fiction movies were designed after that. And that was a really great thing. Now we’re watching a lot of movies that are Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes of ‘Blade Runner.’
The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.
Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction’s most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.
So much American science fiction is parochial – not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes people talk about conflict between humans and machines, and you can see that in a lot of science fiction. But the machines were creating are not some invasion from Mars. We create these tools to expand our own reach.
In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot.
I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I’m not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
If you’re going to make a science fiction movie, then have a hover craft chase, for God’s sake.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.
I was not into sci-fi, science fiction, at all. I was into some of the old pirate films with Burt Lancaster and stuff. I liked them.
I love science fiction but especially his because it’s so humane.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last ’60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction.
Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of magical creation (fantasy), works of fantastika often preclude comedy, because humor gets in the way of messages of doom or struggle.
Counterfeit Kings is the King Lear of space operas. Science fiction has a fresh, new, no-nonsense voice and his name is Adam Connell.
Science fiction fans are awesome – they love you so much that they’ll watch anything you do, even if it’s complete crap. I never dreamed that I would go to conventions and sit down and have coffee with a Klingon. It’s so weird, but it’s my life.
I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don’t think about these things when I’m writing. I’m just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.
The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.
There is a document in every novel in the world. Even in the most fantastic novel, even in science fiction, there is a documentary side. But, this side is not the crux of the matter.
Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.
I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it’s an old idea in science fiction.
I was born in 1950 and watched science fiction and horror movies on TV and was always really fascinated by them.
Science fiction literature’s focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.
I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today – that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed.
I read science fiction every single day of my life. It’s my primary love.
There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We’re in science fiction now.
Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.
I’ve always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.
There’s a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
Purdom has created a major body of work. Thoughtful, humane, intelligent, extrapolative, involving, his stories are exactly the sort of thing our genre exists to make possible. If you don’t like Tom Purdom, you don’t like science fiction. Period.
I read a lot of science fiction and biography – these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of it is crud.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don’t like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn’t interest me because I’m not learning anything about something I’ll actually have to deal with.
I’d love to do a movie where the monster is human, where the issue is not otherworldly, or horror or science fiction.
Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself “well, that’s not going to happen
I’ve starred in a lot of science fiction movies and, let me tell you something, climate change is not science fiction, this is a battle in the real world, it is impacting us right now.
As a kid, I went from reading kids’ books to reading science fiction to reading, you know, adult fiction. There was never any gap. YA was a thing when I was a teenager, but it was a library category, not a marketing category, and you never really felt like it was a huge section.
I would ask, ‘Have you read ‘1984’? Have you read ‘Brave New World’? If so, I’m sorry, but you read science fiction.’
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Science fiction really is the only genre that lets you use your imagination without limitations.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn’t speak any Russian. He didn’t care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.
Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in bigger ones of space and time.
In science fiction, you can also test out your own realities.
A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.
The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
As far as ‘Windup Girl’ becoming a hit – none of us expected that. ‘Night Shade’ was just hoping not to lose their shirts, and I had grown up hearing from everyone that science fiction didn’t sell, so all of our expectations were very low.
Fantasy is the oldest form of literature and science fiction is just a new twist on it.
In really, really good science fiction the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.
Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can’t imagine you are writing about them.
Modern science fiction is the only form of literature that consistently considers the nature of the changes that face us.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it – mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction – I don’t know if I want to do that anymore.
I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We’re seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.
The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it’s the pulp wing of surrealism. That’s the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.
Well I don’t think of myself as like a horror or science fiction filmmaker. I just think of myself as a filmmaker.
Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.
One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.
I don’t think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction.
I hate the whole Гјbermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn’t do the same thing.
I’m a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy – not so much horror because I get a bit scared.
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.
Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn’t get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they’re going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?
Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.
I don’t put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction – looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That’s a science fictional tool.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
Science fiction has a way of letting you talk about where we are in the world and letting you be a bit of a pop philosopher without being didactic.
When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.
Science fiction annoyed me because it was like, “Why is the world as it is not enough for you?”
If it has horses and swords in it, it’s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that’ll turn a story with a rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
As his talent expands, some of his stories become pointed social commentary; some are surprisingly effective religious tracts, disguised as science fiction. Others still are nostalgic vignettes, but under it all is still Bradbury, the poet of 20th-century neurosis.
I like to come back to the science fiction of Stanislaw Lem. He is comforting but also funny, and although I know his books, there’s always something new to discover.
As a very young writer – kindergarten through about fifth grade – I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the ‘Guinness Book of World Records.’
I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That’s when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there.
I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is ‘Star Trek.’ I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, ‘Oh!’ and I’m fascinated by it.
In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off-putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.
When it comes to the things that people really want in science fiction – like space travel – the simplest things end up causing them not to happen. Humans are 100-pound bags of water, built to live on Earth.
My dad used to tell me stories about aliens and UFOs when I was a kid and I was fascinated by science fiction and aliens.
I want to do science fiction with dark stories.
[A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.
I can see why you like it here,” he said,making a sweeping gesture that encompassed Kyle’s collection of movie posters and science fiction books. “There’s a thin layer of nerd all over everything.” said Jace. “Thanks. I appreciate that.” Simon gave Jace a hard look.
I’ve always believed in the power of rational thinking and behavior as the savior of the world, and science fiction as a powerful medium to encourage that, which explains my signature line, ‘Let’s save the world through science fiction.’
For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
Fantasy/science-fiction stories have been around almost as long as each genre, but every hybrid now lives in the shadow of ‘Star Wars.’
Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.
In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.
I love the writing of Walter Tevis and what he views as the possibilities of science rather than science fiction.
In France, it’s always about life, normal life. We always stick with these realistic things. So when French people are dreaming about American movies, they go and see the thrillers, and Westerns, and science fiction, huge entertaining movies.
Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet.
I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don’t tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.
I think what’s happening is, it’s all – fantasy, science fiction, ghosts, trolls, whatever – finally being called, being admitted to be literature. The way it used to be, before the Realists and the bloody Modernists took over.
I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger.
Science fiction I’ve always been a fan of.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]’s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.
I think a lot of kids get scared by ‘E.T.’ Sometimes when I do the science-fiction conventions, I’ll have a 35-year-old guy with tatts and piercings all over, and he comes up and says, ‘You know, it scared me so much I still can’t watch it.
It does sound like a science fiction story and I may sound like one of these guys who walks up and down with a sandwich board saying the end of the world is nigh, but the end is nigh.
I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I’m a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We’ve had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven’t seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.
I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
In high school and college, I started to read more and write science fiction myself. I was fully engaged in writing in the 1990s.
I’m very picky with what I read. It’s a specific genre of science fiction.
Why don’t they make more science fiction movies? The answer to any question starting, Why don’t they- is almost always, Money.
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
It’s part of a cycle of stories I’m writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.
I’ve always loved massive worlds, whether in fantasy or science fiction. I like the idea of making my own rules as well as utilizing everything that I love or inspires me. It’s very freeing to know you can write a story that can be as big as your own imagination.
To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not ‘shock and awe’, just ‘awe.’
The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day
Fantasy deals with the immeasurable while science-fiction deals with the measurable.
Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn’t have the answers.
Science Fiction is a branch of children’s literature.
When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.
I loved reading all kinds of books, but I particularly loved books like ‘Red Planet’ by Robert Heinlein, which very few people read anymore but is a wonderful science fiction story.
As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I’ve found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.
I definitely gravitate towards quality genre projects and genre of any kind whether it’s science fiction, horror or really anything. I’m just drawn to quality. I don’t think ‘Darkness Falls’ is horror; there isn’t any gore by any stretch of the imagination.
At 18, my first short story was published – I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, ‘Sweetwater.’
A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships – though that never put me off.
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views – on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics – than Robert Heinlein.
I think that the idea of people wanting to steal your genome remains a little bit in the world of science fiction. It’s a new technology, and it’s new science that people are becoming familiar with. It’s critical for us to do everything we can to enable the privacy level that people want.
Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences – large scale engineering, neuroscience.
I was always into science fiction as a kid. I loved science and tinkering with things.
I think what Stargate has going for it is a sense of humor about their science fiction.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
We range widely, we readers of fiction, but I think we all need a home. Mine is science fiction. It’s my home shelf, my homeland, my home planet, my essential genre.
For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects.
I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.
Science fiction is one of the smartest genres around because you have to have so much forethought.
When I was 7 years old, I plagiarized, word for word, stories from science fiction magazines so my teachers would think I was smart.
I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind – mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.
I can’t do fiction unless I visualize what’s going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
Star Trek wouldn’t die. There were a whole lot of young people who were touched by the thought process of science fiction. If you watched a cop show, there wasn’t anything that was going to stimulate your mind.
Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.
I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I’m kind of a dork.
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that’s what a lot of them think science fiction is.
Since I was really little, I’ve just always had an obsession with, not just science fiction, but science and space. And also because as time passes and the more advanced science becomes, the more interesting it becomes.
I’ve always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
I’m fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there’s a scientific lesson, for example – when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That’s actually very valuable.
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
I’m a storyteller, and there’s some genres I like. I don’t think I’m ever going to do science fiction, but I want to do a musical one day. I want to tell stories, I don’t really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.
I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now — where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
I’m not a very big fan of science fiction. I think that I’m a very big fan of living in the physical world.
Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?
The thing that’s interesting about science fiction is that it is always, when it is done well, a lens on our world. And yet it is a metaphor.
If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that’s science fiction. Actually, it’s inevitable. It’s guaranteed to happen.
I don’t remember learning to read, but the first thing I remember reading is a science fiction novel.
If you take the shackles off your imagination, you can go anywhere with science fiction.
Science fiction is the characteristic literary genre of the century. It is the genre that stands in opposition to literary modernism.
There’s more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you’re writing a science fiction novel, there’s probably some speculative technology in it. You’ll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.
I read mostly science-fiction and fantasy when I was a teenager, and I was always drawn to stories where the characters had telepathic powers.
I had decided after ‘Hollow Man’ to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even ‘Basic Instinct’ is kind of science fiction.
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
I consider science fiction and fantasy my genre. And I’ve noticed over the years that there doesn’t tend to be a lot of lighthearted, comedic stuff.
I do love science-fiction and horror movies.
When I was a kid, my grandparents were Greek immigrants on my father’s side. My grandfather used to read me Greek myths, in which there are a great many goddesses and stories of strong women. And I was entranced by them. Then I started reading science fiction very young, and I loved it.
There’s no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
I don’t think working in superheroes is slumming it. I’m proud of this form. I like this. There’s nothing inherently masculine about power fantasies. There’s nothing inherently masculine about superhero comics. There’s nothing inherently masculine about mythology. About science fiction.
Despite what everyone thinks about science fiction, ultimately, at its best, it’s about human beings with human emotions.
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
I find it’s bizarre that science fiction is the one branch of television to push the idea of strong female characters. And I only call it bizarre because strong women aren’t fiction.
Starring in a science-fiction film doesn’t mean you have to act science fiction.
I’m not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.
We are in a tech-heavy society, plunging headlong into an unknown future. Science fiction is what allows you to stand back and analyze the impact of that and put it in context of how it affects people.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
When I was a kid, I had no perception whatever that science fiction was supposed to be a boys’ club.
Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It’s about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‘Star Trek.’ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.
I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it’s the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that’s why I’m attracted to it.
I never would have guessed I would be making science fiction and horror films.
I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.
Incidentally, I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the great science fiction writer and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov. John Updike, who is religious, says I talk more about God than any seminarian. Socialism is, in fact, a form of Christianity, people wishing to imitate Christ.
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
I’m not opposed to doing science fiction or comedy, but there has to be respect. I refuse to be the joke, the fat woman joke, in any movie. I’ve turned down roles.
I love science fiction.
Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.
I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like that’s because technology has caught up with us.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we’re living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to – the material demands it.
The thing about science fiction is that it’s totally wide open. But it’s wide open in a conditional way.
The Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen.
You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.
It may be far in the future, but there’s some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
I actually am grateful for Freddy Krueger, because the big surprise to me – with that sort of double punch of science fiction TV series and then the ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ phenomenon – was that I got an international celebrity out of it.
In ‘Cosmicomics,’ I came close to science fiction – I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.
Science fiction is the field that explores how change can affect us, for well or ill.
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
I’d never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
[Science fiction is] the attempt to deal rationally with alternate possibilities in a manner which will be entertaining.
