science-fiction

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world.

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words _ if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night _ do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match?

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate.

...[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things._ _ Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

A writer is very much like the captain on a star ship facing the unknown. When you face the blank page and you have no idea where you're going. It can be terrifying, but it can also be the adventure of a lifetime.

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Perhaps friendship doesn't divert sound judgment.

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

The truth is crazier than lies because lies are required to stick to possibilities__he truth isn__.