I did one sci-fi movie. I did ‘Gattaca.’ I liked ‘Gattaca’ because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.
I’m a huge science fiction fan.
‘Dasavatharam’ is science fiction, a multi-crore budgeted film worth Rs 50 to 60 crore and ahead of its time.
Science fiction and comedy are generally a pretty bumpy mix.
Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.
Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community.
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
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.
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.
‘Cube’ was the first big science fiction film I was a part of. It was a fantastic directorial debut by one of my oldest friends Vincenzo Natali and it remains one of my most painful and uncomfortable roles. It’s also one of my favorites.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. ‘Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing’ was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back.
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.
Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.
Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, ‘Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it’s going to be a lot different.’
There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He’s sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.
General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
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.
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
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 had a conversation with a biologist in an art gallery, and he persuaded me that it was possible to grow a dress from microbes. It was the craziest thing I had ever heard, but I’m a bit of a science fiction fan and I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
The young adult category is particularly interesting to me in terms of science fiction and fantasy tropes.
The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.
Science fiction writers aren’t short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people’s books.
I’ve always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.
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.
If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn’t come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that’s where the stimuli and influence comes from.
I think you can get away with being a bit more political in science fiction.
Technology has enabled government to have investigative and situational awareness on a scale and scope that were science fiction when the Stasi shut its doors.
I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.
I’m not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.
I’ve been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my ‘Star Trek’ character and I’ve been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex.
I think there’s always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells’ stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It’s one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The range of my interests in science fiction – it really does run a gamut.
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.
There’s always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature and then science-fiction televised shows or movies, partly because they have a different dynamic.
When I wrote ‘Neuromancer’, I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended ‘Neuromancer’, among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.
So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don’t say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
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.
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
I really do like a really good science fiction movie and a really good horror movie. Those are the kinds of things I really like. But, I mean, I’m not into sort of like slasher movies. I like a really good science fiction movie, which is hard to do. They don’t make many really good ones any more.
I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.
It’s like how science fiction in the ’50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it’s a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
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.
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.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that’s because we’re all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
