I started in this racket in the early ’70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
All the pictures I do are contemporary. I’ve sort of discovered I haven’t really been into science fiction or period pictures. And so, in that vein, psychological thrillers play a big part.
Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it’s being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we’d all be too close to.
I don’t put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction – looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That’s a science fictional tool.
I don’t think working in superheroes is slumming it. I’m proud of this form. I like this. There’s nothing inherently masculine about power fantasies. There’s nothing inherently masculine about superhero comics. There’s nothing inherently masculine about mythology. About science fiction.
I love science fiction.
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that’s what a lot of them think science fiction is.
I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.
I’m pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.
I happen to be one of those rare actors that actually loves very intelligent and well-acted science fiction.
I think the best science fiction, especially literature, is political in nature and is often an allegory about something problematic in our world, and it’s something that makes the ‘X-Men’ comics so relevant – they’re about xenophobia and prejudice.
A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.
To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not ‘shock and awe’, just ‘awe.’
It’s horrid to be called a Shakespearean actor because that’s incredibly limiting, and we love acting. We like telling stories; anything that excites us we want to be a part of. Science fiction is fun, too!
I’ve always been a fan of science fiction films, and I’ve never been able to put my particular spin on it.
Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens.
For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
I don’t think I’ve ever really been a science fiction writer. I’m closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.
I would much rather watch a horror film or science fiction than a comedy. I don’t know why. I just like them. I find them relaxing.
When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less ‘real.’
Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.
My most memorable science fiction experience was ‘Star Wars’ and seeing R2D2 and C3PO. I fell in love with those robots.
Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
It’s kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It’s about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.
Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.
I grew up as an artist. Science fiction allows for design and creatures and guns and all the stuff that I like as well. So I think most of the films I make, I’m sure, will be in that category. But I can also see myself making a film like ‘Black Hawk Down,’ and I could also totally do horror.
And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren’t always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design – the machine will itself take over in making further steps.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the ‘Saturday Evening Post.’ He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn’t existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.
I read science fiction every single day of my life. It’s my primary love.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we’re living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to – the material demands it.
I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like ‘Wolf Hall,’ but I’ll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it’s tennis without a net.
My brother is a scientist. He’s a professor at MIT. He brought science fiction into my world.
I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it’s the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that’s why I’m attracted to it.
I would designate as science fiction in the best sense: they are visions and anticipations by which we seek to attain a true knowledge, but, in fact, they are only imaginations whereby we seek to draw near to the reality.
I was not into sci-fi, science fiction, at all. I was into some of the old pirate films with Burt Lancaster and stuff. I liked them.
I don’t read other science fiction. I don’t read any at all.
We are living in a science fiction world.
I think that’s what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There’s no melodrama; there’s no device, It’s just about a human being.
I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it’s a very small percentage of the total. That’s been changing in the last few years.
Science fiction encourages us to explore… all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.
Today’s recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
There’s a long relationship between science fiction and the ‘novel of ideas,’ and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.
At one of the first science fiction conventions I ever went to, I saw a guy wearing a sandwich board promoting his book. Count me out of that one.
When I graduated from high school, I thought I wanted to make science fiction movies, so I applied to film school, but I couldn’t get in. A professor told me I should try architecture instead.
When ‘Blade Runner’ came out, and especially, even actually when ‘Alien’ came out, it kind of changed how all science fiction movies were designed after that. And that was a really great thing. Now we’re watching a lot of movies that are Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes of ‘Blade Runner.’
