I think it's really hard to draw a hard-and-fast line and say 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' doesn't count as science fiction or fantasy. Or at what point do we say mythology is not fantasy, so reading mythology when you're young does not count as an exposure to fantasy?
I'm very picky with what I read. It's a specific genre of science fiction.
I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.
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.
And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.
I've loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I've read quite extensively as an adult.
Personally, I'm not into 'Star Trek' or physics or comic books, but I know I might be in the minority.
I've probably read more bad science fiction than anyone else alive. But I've also read more good science fiction than anyone else alive.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine
I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt.
Isaac Asimov is, in reality, based on something I had invented a few years previously.
Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'
Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other worlds, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.
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.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
I've always been interested in science fiction.
Just as computer science is missing from our school system, so is science fiction.
