Words matter. These are the best Robert J. Sawyer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn’t have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.
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.
Whether it’s created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.
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.
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.
I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.
If you like ‘The Nature of Things,’ or if you like ‘Quirks and Quarks’ you’ll certainly like Lee Smolin’s writing, and ‘Time Reborn’ is his latest nonfiction book, and it’s an absolutely compelling read. It’s worth the time.
One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like ‘FlashForward!’
I’ve long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it’s principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.
I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.
I’m a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.
Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world’s greatest pure physics thinktank, and it’s located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
The fact we exist merely means we exist. That’s all it means.
The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.
Science fiction’s power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.
In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
I am very pro-science.
Everything is cross-platform now. That’s part of the reality that we live in – a multifaceted, multimedia world – and I’m delighted to be a part of that.
The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.
In addition to psychopaths, ‘Quantum Night’ is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.
I’ve had many of my books optioned.
The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops… People don’t tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
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.
Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures – so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.
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.
I frankly couldn’t imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
When you’re changing centuries, people get curious about the future.
The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre’s name: science and fiction.
All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.
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.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people’s heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
You can’t be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.
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.
We’re wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.
I’m a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.
When we have machines that are as intelligent – and then twice as intelligent – as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.
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.
An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable… and in that sense, I’m willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.
It’s possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don’t see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don’t.
My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.
Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations – they can’t just be mouthpieces for the writers’ point of view.
There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.
I’m much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.
You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn’t by living the lives of his or her characters.
If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited.
