We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That’s the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don’t talk about football or anything like that.
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.
It gives me confidence to know that what I’m writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I’m writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.
I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we’re in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It’s something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you’re going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.
The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.
First of all, writing at best – certainly fiction writing – more and more I think is magic.
I prefer fact to fiction.
Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It’s a way to understand how the world will look in the future.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I’m a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‘Star Trek.’ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.
I don’t write literary fiction – I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us – you don’t go into debt to get an MFA. It’s not like getting an MBA – you’re not going to buy yourself out.
It’s hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.
Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.
Also, most people read fiction as an escape – and I wonder whether my books aren’t a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.
I’ve read only fiction, so I don’t know anything actual.
I believe that reality TV should be called ‘not reality’ TV; it’s fiction.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
Truth is stranger than fiction, which is why reality TV is so popular.
Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Because at bottom, I’m interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people’s heads.
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that’s needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
A lot of times, you think of things as being science fiction, but the creation of the ideas makes you want to solve them. Then, in solving them, they give us greater capability.
Any author of fiction will tell you that characters don’t need to be told what to do.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
My taste in watching things runs from dramas and low-budget films to high-end fantasy/science fiction.
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
On the other hand, now that I’m not dependent on fiction for my income, I’ve been writing more short stories despite the fact that there’s no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.
With ‘Nobody Knows,’ I consciously set out to make a fiction film, which is a different approach from ‘Distance,’ but I still applied a lot of the things I learned from making ‘Distance’: for example, how to use the camera in relation to the children and how to create the right atmosphere on set.
The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I’m replaying an event through a song.
As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular – or supremely practical – replies.
I wasn’t trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.
I love historical fiction because there’s a literal truth, and there’s an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
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.’
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences – and I stray pretty far from mine – I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Science fiction works best when it stimulates debate.
Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.
‘Pulp Fiction’ was probably one of the first films I ever saw that really kind of took effect on me. I was about four years old – obviously wasn’t supposed to be seeing that film; my sister kind of sneaked it out and we got to see it. She’s older than me. That was something I always used to watch.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
You look at John Travolta in ‘Pulp Fiction’, you look at Donnie Wahlberg in ‘The Sixth Sense.’ People have liens against them in crazy ways and the audience is always forgiving – if you prove it.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author’s own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
In ‘Nier Automata’, the protagonists are androids, not humans, and that’s very common in a Science Fiction story.
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?
One of the things that I really like about young adult fiction is that you can explore the relationships between teens and their parents. I definitely think that teens are a product of their parents. You either end up just like them or you consciously make the decision to be unlike them.
