Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.
In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
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.
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
I'm a science-fiction fan. All science fiction ends up being reality.
Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.
The people who built the space program - both Soviet and U.S. - were readers of science fiction.
Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.
I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.
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.
I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.
Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.
Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.
The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
