Speculative Fiction Quotes

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

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.

Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

The only way to write about right now is to write about the future.

If you read enough Lionel Fanthorpe, your brain starts to turn to jelly and just dribbles out of your ears.

If what we are doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it's probably not transformative enough

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

I'm very picky with what I read. It's a specific genre of science fiction.

My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't believe 'The War of the Worlds' or 'The Time Machine' have ever been bettered. Plus, I have always had a liking for Victorian and Edwardian clothes and contraptions, which tends to color the worlds I dream up.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville.

I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings.

Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

Science fiction does not attempt to predict. It extrapolates. It just says, "What if?" not what will be? Because you can never predict what will happen, particularly in politics and economics. You can to some extent predict in the technological sphere - flying, space travel, but even there we missed badly on some things, like computers. No one imagined the incredible impact of computers, even though robot brains of various kinds but the idea that one day every house would have a computer in every room and that one day we'd have computers built into our clothing, nobody ever thought of that.

I think it's too fast to say that all sci-fi ultimately winds up having some place in science. On the other hand, imaginative minds working outside of science as storytellers certainly have come upon ideas that, with the passing decades, have either materialized of come close to materializing.

Practically all SF is trash.

The popularity of fantasy surpassing science fiction and the popularity of apocalyptic fiction, particularly for young adults, may indicate a desire to escape a more difficult and confusing reality, even in astrophysics and particle physics.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

I hardly ever read mainstream fiction that deals with life as it is. I like an element of fantasy, something that isn't quite of the real world.

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

I think it's fascinating to look at a world that an author has created that has sort of stemmed from the world now, and usually dystopian books point out something about our current world and exaggerates a tendency or a belief.

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