Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.

What science fiction does is take what might be possible someday and examine what might happen if it were - the drawbacks and the positive things.

Good science fiction is always based in contemporary truths.

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.

Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.

I've always been a fan of science fiction.

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

If you are not in the media today, then you do not exist.

The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.

I read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger. Loved it from the literary point of view.

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.

I haven't read a lot of science fiction, and I never intend to write it; it seems to happen a little bit inadvertently for me, in that I'm trying to follow people into points in their lives that demand that I investigate the future.

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.

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

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 don't think I've ever really been a science fiction writer. I'm closer to a fantasist, speculative fiction, whatever, but labels are ultimately derogatory, and I eschew them as best I can.

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.

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've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.

I think some people have a vague idea, but the general public has no clue what the actual behind-the-scenes of filmmaking is and what this profession is.

I've always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction.

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