Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.
The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.
'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, you get traditional music that's had the words slightly modified, and you'll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.
Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.
Most people assume wrongly that science fiction is a male-based genre, when, in fact, there are far more women who tune into sci-fi than anyone expects.
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.
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.
I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.
We are living in a science fiction world.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Farscape' is not what you call hard science fiction.
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.
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.
I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of Mankind is optimistic then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction.
I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.
Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
I had never seen much of Star Trek, or any other science fiction, before I was cast. But Seven's wonderful.
I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
I'm just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It's great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you're sitting at the edge of your seat and you find yourself holding your breath.
I like the Sci Fi channel and 'Science Fiction Theatre.' I've been doing a lot of television-watching and thinking about good songs to write.
Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.
In a science fiction film, you're uniquely responsible to pay respect to the science represented in the movie.
Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.
To me, fantasy has always been the genre of escape, science fiction the genre of ideas. So if you can escape and have a little idea as well, maybe you have some kind of a cross-breed between the two.