I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?'
I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.
Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.
That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.
Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.
By the time I was in my teens, I was reading science fiction. I had this maternal uncle who had cartons of books. It's important to read because you have to fill your head with words.
Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction - the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters.
Most apocalyptic fiction makes it very clear that it's the end of the world. But 'Bird Box' hasn't convinced me of that. Is 'Bird Box' instead a suburban neurotic nightmare? I don't think so. But it's fun to consider.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.
The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.
I would try to write 'realistic' fiction, and someone would fly, or there would be a black hole full of demons or a girl who attracted frogs.
I don't read Science Fiction.
I was writing novels at eight. It was a science fiction epic, which went by the unimprovable title of 'Another Kind of Warrior.' I'd write it beginning to end, but when I'd finished it, I was another year older. The quality of writing and thought changed radically, so I'd start it again. I re-wrote that same book until I was 16.
If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
'Farscape' is not what you call hard science fiction.
The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.
When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.
Creating the fictional background for a game world isn't significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.
Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but the bravest book publishers to publish.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot. But a lot of effective and interesting radio is based on one character who reacts to the world.
I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Movies feel like work, and reading fiction feels like work, whereas reading nonfiction feels like pleasure.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
