My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature – science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
I’m a science fiction geek from birth – that’s just who I am.
I’ve always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I’d probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it’s such well-trod ground.
A lot of what the ‘Culture’ is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy – you name it – and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?
When I write my books, actually, I’m known for very logical rule-based magic systems. I write with one foot in fantasy and one foot in science fiction.
While I prefer generally more personal dramas in which I can stretch myself… and while I’m not a science fiction buff, I consider ‘2001’ a great film, absolutely enthralling; at ‘Star Wars’ I had a fabulous time, and, at ‘Alien,’ while it was a silly story, I was knocked out.
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.
We have a lot of suspicion of robots in the West. But if you look cross-culturally, that isn’t true. In Japan, in their science fiction, robots are seen as good. They have Astro Boy, this character they’ve fallen in love with and he’s fundamentally good, always there to help people.
Obviously I don’t want to make a film that offends people, but the whole world is so politically correct – I’m not going to not do something because it may be politically incorrect. At some point, the metaphors and allegories break down. They disappear, and you just have science fiction.
It’s very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.
Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.
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.
Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.
The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.
You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.
A lot of comic conventions go way beyond comic books and include other parts of pop culture, like celebrities and science fiction and movies and books. So I go to them either as a celebrity, or as a fan, because I’m a big sci-fi geek.
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.
I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
I have to do more close research and fact checking for the science fiction. This is not however to say that writing good fantasy does not involve doing good research.
Science fiction was never my thing. I have no interest in it.
Well I don’t think of myself as like a horror or science fiction filmmaker. I just think of myself as a filmmaker.
I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
I love science fiction.
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.
For most of us, the thought of traveling to another galaxy probably seems like science fiction. But the truth is, the foundation for humankind’s journey beyond Earth’s solar system is being laid right now aboard our very own International Space Station.
I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.
When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of ‘Optic Nerve,’ I hadn’t even been on a date; I hadn’t had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction.
I’m a bit of a geek, actually. So I always wanted my first film to be science fiction.
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 didn’t need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn’t have the mentality.
‘Floating Worlds,’ published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.
I’d always been a science fiction enthusiast.
There’s an awful lot of hanging around when you’re doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.
I am not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I probably know more than anyone else in the West, but that doesn’t actually mean I am an expert.
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.
I’m not a science fiction writer, I’m a physicist.
Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.
You know, every year ‘Torchwood’ has become something a little different than it was before. It’s still sci-fi, but it doesn’t just deal with spaceships and aliens all the time, because we’ve done that. Our science fiction is more psychological.
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.
Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.
Most of my work is science fiction, with many a spaceship but few cars.
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.
Science fiction, extrasensory perception, and black people are judged by the worst elements they produce.
I think that the idea of people wanting to steal your genome remains a little bit in the world of science fiction.
Like most genres of literary expression, science fiction in China was subject to instrumentalist impulses and had to serve practical goals.
There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don’t think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The City and the Stars.’ It’s set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy… and on and on and on.
Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.
Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.
I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I’m kind of a dork.
