Utopian Fiction Quotes

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

British and Canadian sci-fi strikes me as more forward-looking than its American counterpart, as evidenced by the success of Iain M. Banks, Charlie Stross, Robert Charles Wilson, and Cory Doctorow.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

If utopian fiction became the new trend, I wouldn't read it.

What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it.

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

There are two generic and invariable features that characterize utopias. One is the content: the authors of utopias paint what they consider to be ideal societies; translating this into the language of mathematics, we might say that utopias bear a + sign. The other feature, organically growing out of the content, is to be found in the form: a utopia is always static; it is always descriptive and has no, of almost no, plot dynamics.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

I've always liked authors such as Philip K. Dick and Ray Bradbury.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein's 1942 tale 'Beyond This Horizon.'

I haven't yet written a book in a far-future utopia, where all bad things are eliminated, but it would be fun to do that one day and introduce some subversion.

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers.

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

I think that some of the archetypes and works of science fiction that have pierced pop culture and stayed there are the darker ones and the dystopias.

There is a sort of genre of optimistic science fiction that I like, and I don't think there is enough of. One of my favourites is a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, 'The City and the Stars.' It's set in this far future on Earth in this somewhat static society and trying to break out.

I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today.

I don't know why, but American sci-fi writers seem to focus on the near-future, which has given us Brits a clear run at the most fascinating.

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

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

In terms of fiction, there are a number of writers who are thinking about the future of the environment whose work complements mine. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 is a great example, as is Tobias Buckell's novel Arctic Rising.