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.
My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don’t offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.
Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.
What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I’m a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don’t think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.
Writing fiction is… an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That’s why writing fiction is so much fun: because you’re moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there’s always something there to keep working on.
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.
I’m not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Of course I didn’t pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.
You read a script and its based on ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’, and it goes right in the bin.
In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
I don’t view my memory as accurate or static – and, in autobiographical fiction, my focus is still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality – so ‘autobiographical,’ to me, is closer in meaning to ‘fiction’ than ‘autobiography.’
I think if I’m going to do a science fiction, I’m going to go down a new path that I want to do.
The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.
That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous – I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist – for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.
One of the reasons I did this, because I wasn’t really looking for another science fiction film, was that my daughter can see it. She’s 9 and it’s really a good film for all ages.
People who are readers of fiction aren’t particularly interested in comic books.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
I’m writing another novel and I know what I’m going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
It’s always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Words have great cumulative power, but in the 21st century, a single image is much stronger. An image suggests the unvarnished truth. That is its power and its fiction.
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.
In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don’t have that luxury.
So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That’s why I don’t mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you’re making a fiction film, it’s entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway.
I’m a huge science fiction fan.
To think that the heritage of the West, including post-war liberalism, was a selfish, secular, practical arrangement of politics is a fiction.
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.
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.
I think you can get away with being a bit more political in science fiction.
I’ve said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women’s lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
I tend not to read fiction – I’ll read one novel a year during the summer – but I do read a lot of nonfiction.
A typical biography relying upon individuals’ notorious memories and the anecdotes they’ve invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered ‘nonfiction.’
I have done a lot of things outside of Science Fiction, but there has been an almost disproportionate amount of that genre in my body of work. I don’t know what to make of it.
I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it’s how I get a lot of thinking done.
I wasn’t a big science fiction aficionado, there were a few films like 2001 or Blade Runner that were favorites of mine, but since I started this series I have gained more respect for the genre and become more of a fan myself.
Putin himself is a character out of fiction, an uber-macho former Soviet thug running a massive, expansionist kleptocracy. The man stages photographs riding horses barechested and hunting tigers. His enemies find themselves on the wrong end of radioactive poisoning.
