Zitat des Tages über Fiktionale Schriftsteller / Fiction Writers:
Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
I read a lot of science fiction and biography - these are my two favorite genres. My favorite science fiction writers are Hertling, Suarez, Gibson and Stephenson, but I enjoy many others. I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
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.
I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
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.
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.
A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.
The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.
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.
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
Many fiction writers who put the science in don't get it right.
I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers.
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.
That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.
Fiction writers have long turned to winter to advance bluer palettes, slicker surfaces, and sharper contrasts. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, and flakes start to fall. Horizons shrink. Couples bicker. Cars slide off roads. Obliteration tends to loiter between the sentences.
It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.