John Brunner Quotes

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.

What I love about sci-fi is that every generation's films are based on what we know at that point in time. We make movies about the future but it's always based on what we have. Then as science grows and we discover new things, so do our ideas. You know?

To me, science fiction is about the sense of mystery, the sense of awe. Not 'shock and awe', just 'awe.'

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

The challenge of the unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of the accomplished past.

Yeah, I think speculation keeps things really interesting.

Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.

I suppose each project is a new thing, so there's all this excitement and nerves about this new thing. Every single thing is like a new thing, so it's never what I expect. I don't know what to expect for the next thing. There are always different people. It's interesting.

There are lots of futurists that spend their whole life trying to figure out who we're going to be in 40, 50, 60, 100 years. That's the great thing about science fiction.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.

Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.

My mind is like a theme park, because it's fun and there's lots of cool stuff and you can take rides.

Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

Sci-fi is about 'what if this happened,' and 'what would you do.' You can play around with social dilemmas, or look at society or, in my case, relationships, in a very different way.

I never think of the completed film, rather the adventure of what I'm about to live.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality.

The very desire to be certain,to be secure,is the beginning of bondage.It's only when the mind is not caught in the net of certainty,and is not seeking certainty, that it is in a state of discovery.

There's no such thing as writing about the future. The future hasn't happened yet.

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.

My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.