Ernest Cline Quotes

When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

My favourite book in the world is 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson.

There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

I love William Gibson.

The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!

I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.

I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

When 'Ghost in the Shell' was first made, it was so prescient. It was sci-fi.

We are living in a science fiction world.

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out - it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

Honestly, I would never say, 'Oh, I've decided not to read 'The Left Hand of Darkness' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.' I've decided not to read 'Neuromancer' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.''

Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets.

One of the things I liked about the movie 'Minority Report' was they used a lot of futurists as consultants to really try to understand what the world really would be like in 50 years.

The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it's cool, it's fun, it's healthy, it's sexy, it's stylish. On the other hand it's terrifying, it's alienating, it's addictive, and it's scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.

We just decided to pick the date 'The Matrix' opened in most of the world. At the end of the day, it worked out really great because the world seems to have got to a place where I think the movie is even more relevant now than it was several months ago.

I can't imagine that life can be replaced with a computer universe. I can't accept it.

I think a lot of people have an idea of virtual reality from science fiction, books and movies that have been out over the last couple of decades.

Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, robots, Wolfman - all of this stuff was really popular in the '50s. Robots are the only one of those make-believe monsters that have become real. They are really in our lives in a meaningful way. That's pretty fascinating to me.

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with, but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped,' I focus on neural implants.

I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project 'Artificial Intelligence,' which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.