I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it’s a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when I left high school, which has always been very special to me – it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I’m also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
Most of my work is science fiction, with many a spaceship but few cars.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we’re now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.
I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.
People who love science fiction really do love sex.
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.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.
I grew up raiding my brother’s comic book stash. I tried to lose myself in fiction.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
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.
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
‘Confederate,’ in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It’s a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
If you make a movie about Elizabeth I, how much of the dialogue is her real words? Audiences know when they go see a movie that it is fiction.
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
A lot of young-adult authors, great ones, have tried their hands at literary fiction, and not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit, and not for lack of trying.
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.
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction – and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the literati.
I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I’d go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
I know how to write fiction well.
I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don’t think there’s a single writer who influences me.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I’ve always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
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.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.
Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it – or, rather, it’s fiction that allows us to ‘construct’ our world. It’s haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.
Giving the same value to fiction as to fact in the interest of so-called fairness is to mislead the American people and the press has become party to that.
Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
When you’re writing fiction, you’re in every character ’cause you can’t help it.
I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.
I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
I wrote speculative fiction because I loved to read it, and thought I could do better than some of the people who were getting published.
I’ve always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I’ve even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
So much emotion goes into writing fiction.
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
I want to be the Cecil B. DeMille of science fiction.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
It’s clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space… But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
I’ve always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
It’s always a mixture of fiction and your own story. It’s more I recreate atmospheres and moods through songs.
I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I’d entered the competition instead – I’d probably have come nowhere and given up on the whole fiction game.
I’ve loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I’ve read quite extensively as an adult.
In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what’s going to happen.
There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.
