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.
There’s no difference between science and science fiction.
With science fiction there’s endless possibilities.
I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what’s to come, so I think that’s really interesting.
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.
It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, ‘This is the moon, this is the moon,’ and I would look up and say, ‘That’s the Earth, that’s the Earth,’ in my head. So, it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space… But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
I don’t really see science fiction as fiction. I can imagine colonies on Mars and everything.
I am playing in a playground that’s already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you’re frightened of is to make fun of it. That’s why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.
Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that’s what I know and what I’m comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
I never, as a reader, have been particularly interested in dystopian literature or science fiction or, in fact, fantasy.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren’t all that great).
Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.
As a senior editor at Tor Books and the manager of our science fiction and fantasy line, I rarely blog to promote specific projects I’m involved with, for reasons that probably don’t need a lot of explanation.
I’m not well-versed in the science fiction world. I’m hoping that I’ll get more opportunities in it because you get to create a new world.
I would love to play a romantic lead at some point. I would love to play the hero at some point. It would be fun to be in a huge franchise blockbuster based on a series of books, whether it’s fantastical or science fiction.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written ‘Neuromancer’ on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote ‘Snow Crash’ in the early ’90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
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.
I’ve loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I’ve read quite extensively as an adult.
Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I’ve actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
I can enjoy ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Star Trek,’ but I really appreciate hard science fiction.
‘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 spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it’s an old idea in science fiction.
I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, ‘Well, it’s time to see if I can do this.’ I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
I always like science fiction.
I have been spending the better part of my professional life trying to create self-driving cars. At Google, I am working with a world-class team of engineers to turn science fiction into reality.
When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.
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.
I read so much science fiction when I was young. I believe science fiction is the genre for exploration and to learn about possibilities via book.
The main difficulty is finding an idea that really excites me. We live in an age when miracles are no longer miracles, and science and the future are losing their sense of mystery. For science fiction, or at least the type of science fiction I write, this development is almost fatal, but I’m still giving it all I’ve got.
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.
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed ‘steampunks.’ Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.
When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.
When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn’t pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
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.
Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series ‘Star Wars’ is no exception.
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 am playing in a playground that’s already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.
Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
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.
‘Filk’ is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community – you get parodies, you get traditional music that’s had the words slightly modified, and you’ll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.
And nowadays, the idea of AI is not really science fiction anymore – it’s just science fact.
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction. My family, we all used to watch ‘Star Trek’ together, which is kind of a nerdy family activity.
I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
My interest in film is sort of catholic – apart from science fiction and horror movies, I’ll watch almost everything.
For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is ‘The Foundation Trilogy,’ by Isaac Asimov.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction – and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the literati.
