It started getting too crazy with 'Earth A.D.' The concepts started becoming too brutal and violent. It was less about fiction and more about the real world, the past, present, and future. I think a lot of people got freaked out by that.
One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
I've read pretty broadly on the Holocaust - both fiction and non-fiction - and to me, 'The Lost Wife' is one of the best. The horrors of war serve as a backdrop to a love affair that spans a lifetime, and that love story stayed with me long after I put down the book.
Star Trek wouldn't die. There were a whole lot of young people who were touched by the thought process of science fiction. If you watched a cop show, there wasn't anything that was going to stimulate your mind.
When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.
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.
Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.
I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that's a little way off yet.
At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.
All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.
I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature.
I've loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I've read quite extensively as an adult.
The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.
In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
Stanley Kubrick's '2001' was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn't quite work for me.
Reality always outstrips fiction. Whatever you make up, something more incredible always pops up in real life.
I can't get enough of 'Pulp Fiction.' I just love it; it still holds up. And it didn't win Best Picture, by the way. Didn't win.
My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.
There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.
I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking.
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.
I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.
When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is when we are kids and we make up our worlds: You be this guy, and I am going to be this guy, and we are going to go slay dragons.
In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It's so schizophrenic.
You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before.
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
