Quotes About SF

Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is 'Star Wars' if not pure quill SF?

The specific difference between sf and other estranging genres, such as fantasy, is that sf's displacements must be logically consistent and methodical; in fact, they must be scientific to the extent that they imitate, reinforce and illuminate the process of scientific cognition.

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

Language The clichéd image of an alien emerging from a flying saucer and declaring 'Take me to your leader' highlights one problem in alien narratives. As soon as aliens speak, their otherness becomes compromised, because we associate language with a way of life and view it as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. One way out of this impasse in early SF was to use the convenience of an instant translation device.

THAT'S WHAT SF IS ALL ABOUT. IF YOU WISH TO YIELD TO REALITY, GO READ PHILIP ROTH; READ THE NEW YORK LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT MAINSTREAM BESTSELLING WRITERS. . . . THIS IS WHY I LOVE SF. I LOVE TO READ IT; I LOVE TO WRITE IT. THE SF WRITER SEES NOT JUST POSSIBILITIES BUT WILD POSSIBILITIES. IT'S NOT JUST, "WHAT IF—." IT'S "MY GOD; WHAT IF—." IN FRENZY AND HYSTERIA. THE MARTIANS ARE ALWAYS COMING.

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.

Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either.

I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting.

I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF.

Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.

I'm a genre writer - I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I'm not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write 'core SF' - it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.

I've held my silence when I probably shouldn't have. But I was in the minority, a woman writing SF, and I was afraid of career backlash. I was afraid of being excluded or losing opportunities if I didn't play nice.

There was a pizza delivery robot from 2008, where I built a Prius to deliver pizza from downtown SF to Treasure Island.

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.

Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.

Since this was the first and only series I had ever produced, I was unaware of what the 'Normal' environment was for a studio. I tried to run it as I did in my SF studio.

In movies, SF dominates utterly: by my count, 57 of the top 100 movies of all time, and nine of the top ten. The only top ten film that isn't SF is Titanic, made by a director who cut his teeth making SF films.

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Here now, in the elsewhen of the SF Café, we've had the shenanigans going on for decades, but we haven't yet adjusted to the idea of SF as a mode, still search for ways to parse it all as one big generic form, one big conventional template, bound in negotiated strictures albeit abstract. We can offer any text as SF.