Top 33 Ann Leckie Quotes

The ‘indistinguishable from magic’ thing is highly dependent on where a viewer is looking from and not something intrinsic to any particular sort of tech.

My taste in both is pretty eclectic. I do encourage people to try new and different kinds of tea if they can – there are so many different sorts, and so many, flavored or not, and there’s bound to be something you like. The same with choral music, really.

Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about ‘adventure,’ but writers can’t build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

Singing together is something human beings just do, and there are hundreds of years worth of just European vocal music available to read and hear.

The ability to live for five hundred years would be an incredible gift. But I greatly fear it would be a gift only for the wealthy – one that might greatly widen the gap between those with access and those without.

Writing books can be very individual – one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.

I tend to edit some as I go – partly because one of the reasons I don’t outline much is that I don’t know what the next scene will be until I’ve actually written the previous scene.

I do realize the impulse to classify people by the food and art they consume is strong – sometimes I have to remind myself not to do that.

The ’70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.

The Internet really lets people connect that wouldn’t have in the past, and lets conversations happen and connections happen.

‘Ancillary Sword’ picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

I don’t think anybody submits their first story and sells right away.

Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding – the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.

Working for several years as a waitress, you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table.

I’ve always enjoyed making up stories, especially when I was bored and just sitting around. It got really serious after the children came along.

I do think that narrative is very important – I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.

The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything – tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn’t matter. It’s all productive work.

When I need to get away from my desk, I tend to take walks or go places. I also like to bead – working with beads to make jewellery.

One of the nice things about a second book is that your readers already have so much of the introductions on board, they don’t have to put all their attention into figuring out the world and can more easily let that play out as a background to the other things you want to do.

I’ve been a fan of Jack Vance since before I was in high school.

I love science fiction, and one of the things I love about it is that it’s so very different. You can read stuff that’s just fast-paced adventure, and the characters are cardboard, but who cares, because they’re heroes, and we love it. And you can read stuff that’s really deep character, and everything in between.

I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it.

Science fiction is huge and varied, and there’s almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.

It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices.

When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I’d work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I’d work on next, and then I’d panic.

‘Star Trek’ still – I’m kind of intrigued by the way that the standard foods of various non-humans are sometimes portrayed as downright disgusting.

In non-fiction, I found John Gardner’s two writing books to be tremendously helpful.

Occasionally, I hear grumbles about everything being a series or a trilogy, but apart from the question of them maybe selling more books, I think that there’s a real problem in trying to introduce a new world or a new concept while also getting your reader to pay close attention to your characters and themes.

I’d say my biggest influences are writers like Andre Norton and, particularly when it comes to the Radch, C.J. Cherryh.

I’ve been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.

Kids are fabulous, but when you’re home all day with an infant that can’t talk, your brain starts to kind of melt, and I thought, ‘I have to do something, or my brain is just going to liquefy.’