I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.
All the pictures I do are contemporary. I've sort of discovered I haven't really been into science fiction or period pictures. And so, in that vein, psychological thrillers play a big part.
Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars.
About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.
Science fiction literature's focus is on ideas, the concept of change, and the impact on humanity. Those concepts are hard to capture on film. They work better in the mind.
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it.
I think Junior is certainly a science fiction premise as is Twins, as is Dave, beyond Ghostbusters.
So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.
Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
Implanting a microchip inside the brain to augment its mental powers has long been a science fiction trope.
There's an awful lot of hanging around when you're doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views - on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics - than Robert Heinlein.
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.
Moonshots live in that place between audacious projects and pure science fiction.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.
One of the most interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is the way that the genres can offer different perspectives on matters to do with the body, the mind, medical technology, and the way we live our lives.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
Most science fiction is based on our knowledge now and uses that to project the future.
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
I wasn't a big science fiction aficionado, there were a few films like 2001 or Blade Runner that were favorites of mine, but since I started this series I have gained more respect for the genre and become more of a fan myself.
Predicting has a spotty record in science fiction. I've had some failures. On the other hand, I also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of fundamentalist Islam... and I'm not happy to be right in all of those cases.
I was born in 1950 and watched science fiction and horror movies on TV and was always really fascinated by them.
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.
Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?
I do enjoy reading some science fiction.
Starting on February 1, 2010, and running through until May 30, I will be Toronto Public Library's Writer in Residence, working out of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculation at the Lillian H. Smith branch at College and Spadina.
