Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

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

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

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

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?

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

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

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind.

Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

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.

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.

With science fiction there's endless possibilities.

The genre of science fiction is a fun house, an amusement park ride, but it's also a problem. The question that's always being indirectly asked is this: 'Just who do we think we are and, further, who do we want to be?'

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.

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.

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.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future.

Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.

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

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

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.