Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.
SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.
Not all SF or fantasy has to inspire new scientists and engineers.
Nike SF Air Force Ones are hands down my absolute favorite sneakers.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.
As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.
The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.
What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.
I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.
SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
I'm a geek. I love SF and fantasy. I listen to metal. I follow the Oakland Raiders and the Orlando Magic.
I've always loved far future SF, so it was more or less a given that I would one day want to write in that form.
I am a woman. I write SF. And it's not acceptable to treat me as anything less than an equal. I won't stand for it.
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
I had a respected SF writer call me 'girlie' and demand that I get him a coffee, before the panel we were on together.
There was a pizza delivery robot from 2008, where I built a Prius to deliver pizza from downtown SF to Treasure Island.
I think the best SF writers are very aware of what we, in the scientific community, are doing, thinking, and discovering.
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
I grew up reading SF in the '70s and '80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds.
There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.
The most colorful section of a bookstore is the display of SF books, with art by people like Wayne Barlow, who is a terrific artist.
An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.
What kind of hard SF do I write? Everything from near-future, Earth-centric techno-thrillers to far-future, far-flung interstellar epics.
One SF prediction that I would like very much to see: Get solar collectors launched to beam energy back home, and get away from fossil fuels.
I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.
I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in - to demand! - a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.
I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
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.
I was utterly without worldly ambition because I knew that all that was needed for a rich, full life was a few shillings a week with which to buy SF magazines and beer.
Since this was the first and only series I had ever produced, I was unaware of what the 'Normal' environment was for a studio. I tried to run it as I did in my SF studio.
Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.
There is so little SF drawn from modern scientific thinking, in any discipline, that I'm much more cheered by the successes than the failures, most of which are forgivable.
Tor.com has been a venue for original SF and fantasy since 2008, but we've never formalized our process for submissions. Indeed, for a long time, we were totally winging it.
I like SF environments that seem used, and lived in, every day; not just rolled off a props truck. Look around you! Everything is scuffed, scratched, dinged, faded, even rusty.
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.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.
As a kid, I became a total SF geek. It started in the 5th grade with Asimov's 'Lucky Starr' series of what would now be called 'young adult' novels of adventures in the solar system.
Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.
I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.
'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.