Damon Lindelof Quotes

Sometimes when we label something dystopian fiction, I feel like we're trying very hard not to use the words 'science fiction,' because science fiction has those horrible connotations of rocket ships and bodacious babes.

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.

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

I think the idea of a distant, far off dystopia, where the world is completely different from what we have now, is good, but it's been done. Especially in YA movies.

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.

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

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible).

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated.

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.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

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.

I have always been a fan of 'Star Trek.' I love Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool.

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.'

A lot of movies were influenced by 'Logan's Run,' like 'Minority Report'. A lot of films have those elements in them.

The original 'Star Trek' is very much a product of the '60s - the new frontier, optimism, the idea of bringing democracy to the galaxy. It's still a timeless show, but it's very much a show made in the 1960s.

There is not a new hopeful, optimistic vision of the future that I am currently aware of. Certainly, not one that has penetrated pop culture awareness in the way 'Star Trek' has.

I think that any sort of fantasy or sci fi that is grounded in something that could ostensibly be real - 'Jurassic Park' being my favorite example - is that much more prescient because it means that much more. Maybe one day, what if?

I wrote this book, '2030,' and I was careful in the book not to overdo the future because I don't think it comes that fast.

I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.