For me, to get to play an action hero in a science fiction film is a marriage of two genres that I’m a huge fan of.
The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I’d call science fiction. You feel like you’ve been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.
But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
A good scenario doesn’t make a good science fiction story – but it’s a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
I’ve always been a science fiction fan since I had understood the conception of what a story was.
I read a lot of science fiction, and it’s ingrained, in a certain way, and I’ve been very involved with Kerouac and the Beats, but before that, it was a lot of science fiction.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last ’60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
With ‘Futurama,’ I was just worried that somebody would beat us to it; it seemed so obvious that there should be an animated science fiction show set in the future. And one of the reasons why it’s not, I learned, is that it’s really, really difficult.
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We’ve had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven’t seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ wasn’t about a Martian invasion – it was a critique of British colonialism, and… ‘The Time Machine’ is really an indictment of the British class system.
Science fiction to me is the ultimate art form, because it speculates on bodies and worlds that don’t exist.
I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can’t talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
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.
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.
Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do – we’re as close to realizing science fiction as it gets.
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
Sometimes you see films, not just science fiction films, where you get the sense that if the camera were to pan just to the left or the right, all of a sudden you’d be seeing light stands and crew standing around. But with ‘Blade Runner,’ the beauty of it is that it felt like a real, breathing city.
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it’s the science of prehistory – palaeontology and archaeology – rather than astronomy or physics.
As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I’ve found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.
I remember starting ‘Game of Thrones,’ everyone said ‘you have to watch it,’ but I thought ‘it’s science fiction, it’s not real, it’s nothing.’ I gave it a go and then couldn’t stop watching it.
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 started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
‘Mars et Avril’ is a science fiction film. It’s set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it’s expensive, it’s set in the future, and it’s got tons of visual effects, and it’s shot on green screen.
I like the Sci Fi channel and ‘Science Fiction Theatre.’ I’ve been doing a lot of television-watching and thinking about good songs to write.
Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.
In a science fiction film, you’re uniquely responsible to pay respect to the science represented in the movie.
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, science fiction became a tool for popularizing scientific knowledge, and its main intended readers were children.
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.
When I grew up, I saw the moon landing, and I was fascinated watching them as a child, and that’s what really turned me onto space and science fiction, and I started watching things like ‘Lost In Space,’ and that led me to ‘Star Trek,’ which was a major influence on my life.
As a fellow science fiction author, Heinlein largely raised me, and I resent it when some folks lazily dismiss Heinlein as a ‘right winger’ or even ‘fascist.’
With science fiction there’s endless possibilities.
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it’s why I’ve never re-visited that area because I feel I’ve done it.
The thing that’s interesting about science fiction is that it is always, when it is done well, a lens on our world. And yet it is a metaphor.
One futuristic novel that had a huge impact on me was Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ which is kind of science fiction plus Gothic.
As a kid, I didn’t drift into the comic world too much because I preferred to read fantasies novels and science fiction.
I’m a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’ It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.
If I’m desperate, I’ll read anything. But even when I can be choosy, I still have no hard-and-fast rules. I have rules about what I won’t read, rather than what I will. No science fiction, no romance, no chick lit. Although even these rules can be broken.
Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn’t bother censoring it.
I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.
I think that what made people accept Starbuck as a woman was that she was just such an interesting character. I think that once people put their guard down and their preconceived notions of what the show is supposed to be and just allowed it to really be good science fiction.
I’ve always been kind of a mutt creatively. I started off in journalism, and I’ve actually done more police and procedural shows than I’ve ever done science fiction shows. I was on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ I was on ‘Walker, Texas Ranger,’ I was on ‘Jake and the Fat Man.’
Despite what everyone thinks about science fiction, ultimately, at its best, it’s about human beings with human emotions.
In fantasy and science fiction, world-building is an essential part of the story. But as a reader, I don’t just want descriptions of food, clothing, and places. I want to understand the world to its core, through the eyes of those who live in it.
In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting onto me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot.
I’d always wanted the show to be more reality based science fiction, something along the lines of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I consider to be the classic science fiction film.
