Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.
— Robert J. Sawyer
Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism.
We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.
An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.
The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.
When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.
Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.
Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.
You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'
The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.
We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.
When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.
Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.
I've had many of my books optioned.
George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.
Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.
My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.
I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.
Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.
When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.
Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.
There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.
Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that.
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.
I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.
Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.
Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.
All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.
I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.
Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.
The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.
It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.
Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.
When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.
People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.
I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.
What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.
There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.
If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.
Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.
Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.
A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.
Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.
