Greg van Eekhout Quotes

Edan Lepucki sets her debut novel, 'California,' somewhere in the 2060s. The nearness of this era helps make her vision both more discomfiting and more credible.

Most near-future fictions are boring. It's always dark and always raining, and people are so unhappy.

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

'The Hunger Games' takes place in Panem, a country which is part of America. It's post-apocalyptic. There's been a global war. The Panem country is what remains of this hugely destructive war.

We've gone from, in the '50s and '60s, being very optimistic about the future, where the future is all spaceships and The Jetsons and flying cars, to where we were just sure the future was going to be a massive pile of rubble.

The world is rapidly changing - and with it, we face new global challenges.

'Man is an endangered species,' announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump 'Battlefield Earth.' And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it's an old idea in science fiction.

I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.

I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.

If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar's parents!

Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble imagination.

What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.

I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

I think that the thing that is really strong with 'The Hunger Games' is just that it comes from a very strong idea.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

I don't think we are going to become extinct. We're very clever and extremely resourceful - and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I'm sure. But whether our lives will be as rich as they are now is another question.

The world that our children will inherit is going to look substantially different, very quickly, than the world we have today. It's alarming.

It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger.

I did one sci-fi movie. I did 'Gattaca.' I liked 'Gattaca' because that was always the kind of science fiction I really dug, the non-action oriented sci-fi.

I think there is a general unrest or curiosity about what a human future is going to be like, and whether the way we're living is even sustainable.

Many of the crises we see in the 21st century, I would argue, have their roots in the dawn of the Neolithic.