Being a superhero is a metaphor for a job that is overwhelming.
— Laeta Kalogridis
'Altered Carbon' is one of the most seminal pieces of post-cyberpunk hard science fiction out there - a dark, complex noir story that challenges our ideas of what it means to be human when all information becomes encodable, including the human mind.
Like a lot of people, I sold my first script in graduate school at UCLA, a 'Joan of Arc' for producer Joel Silver.
It's always fair to criticize, to question, to engage about things like whitewashing and violence against women and choices of lack of diversity. All those things are really, really a good thing to talk about.
For years, I have been inspired by the inventive and masterful storytelling of the 'SAO' franchise. I'm thrilled to get the opportunity to work with such talented partners to bring this cutting-edge yet timeless story to a new format at Skydance.
I'm a geek! I'm a fan girl; I'm very proud of that. Get me near Orlando Jones, it will not be pretty.
The intersection of being female and a showrunner carries difficult challenges.
All the science fiction I loved as a kid was holding up a mirror to society and warning us about the need for course correction.
I just never count on anything. You can't.
One of my favorite stories is, I got fired off 'Bionic Woman' in part because I was told that I don't know how to write women, and they promptly replaced me with a guy. What I find lovely about the story is how unaware the white dude who said that to me was when he said it.
When I was a kid, my grandparents were Greek immigrants on my father's side. My grandfather used to read me Greek myths, in which there are a great many goddesses and stories of strong women. And I was entranced by them. Then I started reading science fiction very young, and I loved it.
Our worst instincts as human beings have to do with our carelessness with natural resources, and when the body itself becomes just one more of those resources, how will we treat it? Will we treat it with such indifference and with such depersonalization that it becomes more like a very fancy car than a repository of the self?
Iconic jobs are interesting to deconstruct through therapy.
On one hand, my gender has never been an issue. The issue has always been what's on the page. But the reality is, an awful lot of women fought an awful lot of battles to get me to that place.
To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.
It was very, very important to me to represent a broader swath of humanity that often isn't seen in futuristic sci-fi.
I've taken a number of creative leaps, and some of them worked, and some of them didn't, but I don't regret any of them because you can't possibly get to the ones that work without the ones that don't.
I don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out, 'Gosh, I wonder how guys feel,' because most every piece of art I look at invites me into that experience.
Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were the biggest inspirations for my work because they trod into areas considered to be owned by male writers and created these worlds that are infused with an understanding of so much more than just technology.
All of us in the modern world are constructing our identities, largely through social media, for a larger audience.
The essential nature of all filmed entertainment is that you area always straddling the line of whether or not you can realize something that you want to do.
Don't worry about what happens when things go wrong; just accept that they're going to, and figure out how do you want to cope with it when it does.
This kind of art - the dystopic future kind of art - is designed to make you uncomfortable.
The emotional passage of time is always a good thing.
Honestly, I would never say, 'Oh, I've decided not to read 'The Left Hand of Darkness' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.' I've decided not to read 'Neuromancer' because I've seen 'Blade Runner.''
Violence in drama is an external contextualization of internal conflicts.
When you haven't met someone, regardless of whether they're an author or not, when you're taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there's potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.
The world that we live in isn't uniform-looking, and the future that we're headed toward isn't uniform-looking.
I personally believe that violence against women in our society is not going anywhere.
There are certain expectations placed on writers if other people have put a value on their gender. I'm aware of the hundreds of tiny differences that happen when people are seeing your gender before they see something else.
'The Handmaid's Tale' is not a book or show advocating enslaving women or creating a theocracy. It's not glorifying that. It's talking about what happens if that happens.
My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.
The range of my interests in science fiction - it really does run a gamut.
There was a brief period in college where I flirted with the idea of becoming a lawyer because my father was one. But I was cured of it rather swiftly.
Of course I worry about whitewashing, and I feel very strongly that whitewashing was, is, and continues to be a problem in entertainment.
