Imagined Futures Quotes

I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it's an old idea in science fiction.

There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own.

Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.

I have never, ever, not once, met a writer who said he or she would never read a mystery or a story set in some imagined future.

If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.

I've spent a lot of time researching the subject and government deception. So to be involved in Star Trek is perfect for me. I enjoy meeting the fans and discussing my interests with them.

When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.

Within the realm of fiction, it is always tempting to set one's stories in a dystopian future, where all our misgivings about state power can be shown in full force.

Your wedding completely changes the direction of your life, you know, no matter how greatly you desire it. I think that moment of doubt and faintness comes from all those imagined and now impossible futures all pressing in on you at once. It is your last chance to experience them, you see, and they all want to be lived at that moment.

Although I write dystopian fiction, I don't believe in dystopian fantasies.

I wanted to make the world of 'The Last Book in the Universe' as real as possible, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I decided the world would be a very different place, but people would be pretty much the same.

There are loads of sociopolitical, racial, class and future-planet situations that really interest me, but I'm not really interested in making a film about them in a film that feels like reality because people view that in a different way. I like using science fiction to talk about subjects through the veneer of science fiction.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.

In counterfactual history, nothing is certain.

The aliens coming and wiping our electricity and having technical power over us... we don't know what's out there. It something that seems so fictional, but it's something that's possible.

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.