Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.

The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

The highest compliment I can give a science fiction book is that it's 'plausibly surreal' - it manages to feel like a relentless extrapolation from today even as it overwhelms with unexpected consequences of that extrapolation.

In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.

Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.

Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.

One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

I've always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

The whole point of science fiction is that you explore the effect of ideas on a society.

I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

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

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

I'm a science-fiction fan. All science fiction ends up being reality.

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

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