Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.

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

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

If there's a story I absolutely cannot tell without faster-than-light travel, then I am quite prepared to accept it - even though I don't personally believe it is possible.

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?

Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.

For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.

When the legislator is finally elected --- ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit …

We are gong down the road to stateism. Where we will wind up, no one can tell, but if some of the new programs seriously proposed should be adopted, there is danger that the individual-whether farmer, worker, manufacturer, lawyer, or doctor-will soon he an economic slave pulling an oar in the galley of the state.

The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favored the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded, individualism.

Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in 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 is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

Science fiction is the field that explores how change can affect us, for well or ill.

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.

Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.

What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

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.

The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.

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

Communism is fascism with a human face.

The family is the American fascism.