Joan D. Vinge Quotes

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.

I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

I'm trying to move a little more toward literary fiction while still retaining a popular feel.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

Octavia Butler was more interested in writing a good story than in worrying about where to slot it.

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

I write science fiction for people who don't read a great deal of science fiction.

Every kid I meet who's a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it's the one place where you can do the forbidden.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.