Words matter. These are the best Science Fiction Quotes from famous people such as Seth Grahame-Smith, Paolo Bacigalupi, China Mieville, Robert J. Sawyer, Ken Liu, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences – large scale engineering, neuroscience.
I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.
It’s kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is not really well-known in the West.
Science fiction writers create all sorts of futures – that comes with the job. But it’s not the type that matters – hopeful or dark – it’s the variety we see as readers. It’s nurturing the imaginations of those who will go on to create the world around us.
It seems like there’s a real appetite for science fiction in the States.
Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.
If you don’t care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn’t try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001’ was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn’t quite work for me.
I mostly get bored by comedies, action movies, science fiction movies – they are so predictable.
I never had a favourite book! I liked all kinds of things – science fiction, so I read Heinlen and Ray Bradbury, and I also liked reading about kids like myself, so I read Judy Blume and Norma Klein and Paula Danzinger and a lot of other writers. I also read James Herriot!
I’ve probably read more bad science fiction than anyone else alive. But I’ve also read more good science fiction than anyone else alive.
I’m not a great ‘Star Trek’ fan, but I love science fiction.
It shouldn’t be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you’re watching a science fiction show like ‘Star Trek’ and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it’s a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.
If I want to speculate wildly about the future, I have my science fiction. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is either crazy or lying.
Normal television limits what you can do. With science fiction, you can exercise your imagination more. I fell in love with it.
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare.
Fantasy is fantasy. It’s fiction. It’s not meant to be a textbook. I don’t believe in letting research overwhelm the fiction. That’s a danger of science fiction in particular, as opposed to fantasy. A lot of writers forget that what they’re doing is supposed to be art.
A lot of times, you think of things as being science fiction, but the creation of the ideas makes you want to solve them. Then, in solving them, they give us greater capability.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester sea stories. Shatner was open-minded about science fiction and a marvelous choice.
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
I love horror, mystery, and science fiction, and Poe was one of the founding fathers of those worlds.
It probably wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school and I met the people who became my gaming group that I finally found people who were weird like I was: that loved reading and playing games and not just watching a science fiction or fantasy movie but talking all about it.
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.
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.
I’m always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it’s full of all these made-up words.
The fact that it’s science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
From my point of view, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ isn’t just a science fiction masterpiece; it also happens to be one of my favorite books ever.
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 was a science fiction geek. That lets you know that they come in all sizes and styles, right?
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.
Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
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.
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.
Humor is rare in science fiction… there’s so little of it that it automatically reminds you of other heroes with that acerbic humor when you find it.
I had never seen much of Star Trek, or any other science fiction, before I was cast. But Seven’s wonderful.
When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It’s like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?
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.
I started reading fantasy and science fiction and writing fantasy and science fiction when I was – when I started junior high school.
Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
I always was passionate about science fiction and horror, and my parents enjoyed that as well.
There’s so much overlapping in science fiction.
I’m frustrated with Hollywood and television and the movies because they see science fiction as an excuse for eye candy, for lots of great special effects.
I used to read a lot of science fiction when I was younger.
I haven’t read a lot of science fiction, and I never intend to write it; it seems to happen a little bit inadvertently for me, in that I’m trying to follow people into points in their lives that demand that I investigate the future.
By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.
I’m mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Science fiction writers didn’t predict the fade-out of NASA’s manned space operations, and they weren’t prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
I want to do science fiction with dark stories.
The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate – it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.