Science Fiction Writers Quotes

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. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff. ~ Terry Pratchett

Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description. ~ Charles Stross

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? ~ Adam Roberts

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. ~ William Gibson

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable. ~ Gregory Benford

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. ~ Vernor Vinge

Why would I what?" Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. "Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?" "Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today's inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today's political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and - " Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. "Anyway," he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, "iss goomfer umf." "It's good for us," Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned ~ Amy Lane

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. ~ Philip K. Dick

I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers. ~ Tahmoh Penikett

Many fiction writers who put the science in don't get it right. ~ Kathy Reichs

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak
human, not the other way around. ~ Spider Robinson

The writer's special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them. ~ Kay Kenyon

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. ~ Bruce Sterling

It's always great when you want scientific fact to get a really good science fiction writer to talk to you about it. ~ Robin Williams

Human anatomy is horribly unsuited for outer space. The astroengineers lost sleep over this but not the science fiction writers, who being artists simply didn't mention it. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche. ~ Sam Weller

Despite what your science fiction writers dream, we simply don't have the technology ~ Stephenie Meyer

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. ~ Philip K. Dick

I love storytelling when the writing spins through me like photons on their way to lighting the world. ~ Kay Kenyon

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation. ~ Paul Di Filippo

A novel in progress doesn't have a clear, forward process. It's messy, like a beloved, balky child. ~ Kay Kenyon

Rigorous extrapolation, a gosh-wow love of gadgets, and mystical adventures in strange and mysterious places; every major stream in speculative fiction today can be traced back to authors who were writing before the publishing categories existed. From among the readers in the twenties and thirties who loved any or all of these authors arose the first generation of "science fiction writers", who knew themselves to be continuing in a trail that had been blazed by giants. ~ Orson Scott Card

Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more. ~ Martin Rees

It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it ... I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that. ~ Octavia Butler

The term sci-fi, which most science fiction writers loathe, I will reserve for those motion pictures that claim to be science fiction but are actually based on comic strips. Or worse. ~ Ben Bova

Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt. ~ Gloria Steinem

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless. ~ Michio Kaku

Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet. ~ Jack McDevitt

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens. ~ Rudy Rucker

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels.

He started inventing new words.

This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn't help themselves. They were always inventing new words.

Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein's vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok.

To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing.

A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink.

They'd groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking.

People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking.

With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing.

In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok.

Baby had always been popula ~ Jarett Kobek

I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met. ~ Robert Silverberg

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things." – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11 ~ Walter Mosley

I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human. ~ Joe Morton

I love everything about you. I told myself that was what it was. All those parts, separately that I loved them. I watch you. I'm inside your mind. I see who you are. I've decided it isn't about loving everything about you. It's simply about loving you. ~ Christine Feehan

The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction. ~ Ted Chiang

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me. ~ Stephen King

It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days. ~ John Pipkin

Life rushes when we're weak and drags when we're ready, always at odds with what we need and when. ~ Halo Scot

I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two. ~ Ian McEwan

A seductive female voice added, "Hello Henry, I'm the deputy director. But you can call me Samantha."
Henry's response was accusing. "You're a droid!"
"I'm an R9054, one of the most powerful robotic systems devised by Ingermann-Verex, my makers. And I prefer the term humanoid if you don't mind."
Locking onto her image, Henry noted the strange wrap-round view panel enshrouding the top part of the body shell.
Inside, there was a human face seemingly trapped inside an electronic body. Although he'd seen a number of droids with similar face screens, Samantha's was the most realistic, so he guessed her claims of being top of her range were probably right. ~ Andrew R. Williams

Braxton Cosby's stories feel personal and well thought-out. I'm happy to welcome this entertaining writer to the YA science fiction field. I look forward to more of his work! ~ Tananarive Due

I see you have returned, my love; and your mood is as dark as ever. Did your soldiers not adore you to your complete satisfaction? ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really! ~ Nicolas Roeg

Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations. ~ Raymond E. Feist

This should explain something I've been saying (and writing) for over ten years now: Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present. And both the significance of the distortion and the appropriateness of the convention lie precisely in that what we know of present science does not *deny* the possibility of these distortions eventually coming to pass. Science fiction is about the current world - the given world shared by writer and reader. But it is not a metaphor for the given world, nor does the catch-all term metonymy exhaust the relation between the given and science fiction's distortions of the given. Science fiction poises in a tense, dialogic, agonistic relation to the given, but there is very little critical vocaabulary currently to deal with this relationship of contestatory difference the SF figure establishes, maintains, expects, exploits, subverts and even - occasionally, temporarily - grandly destroys. ~ Samuel R. Delany

They say it's a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers - and I'm talking the most talented - are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams. ~ Haruki Murakami

Never let other people bring you down let Jesus be the one who brings you down, because he knows what he is doing ~ Skye Daphne

I think a lot of people have an idea of virtual reality from science fiction, books and movies that have been out over the last couple of decades. ~ Brendan Iribe

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want. ~ Frederik Pohl

The Dream Box wasn't a place, but it was a destination. It wasn't life, but it was a way of life. Reese wasn't awake in the Meat Space the way he was in Cyber, where a billion liters of endorphins blasted through the biological wiring of his veins with every corner his mind turned, where every conscious or subconscious choice he made was infused with importance. Linked in, he could partake of the guiltless ecstasy that was up for grabs, even for people like him. Linked in as Balmus, he could even be his own hero. ~ Daniel Pike

Fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Making a living out of acting sounded like science-fiction when I was growing up. I didn't know anyone around me who lived from anything related to art. ~ Penelope Cruz

All his senses screamed in warning, the very air reeking of forbidden magic, but duty call him forward. ~ Karen Azinger

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't. ~ Rick Yancey

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time. ~ Octavia Butler

I think one of the big challenges about science fiction is finding truth to relate to as an actor. ~ Amanda Schull

Approaching the trail, he broke through the thicket a short distance ahead of the Empath. Causing the Empaths horse to startle as the surprised rider jerked on the reins. Cap was equally surprised to find a young girl before him instead of an older, experienced male Empath. Cap brought his horse to a quick halt. The young girl pulled a small knife from her boot and cautioned him. "I don't know where you came from, but I'm not easy prey." Her voice shook slightly with fear as she raised the knife.
Not sure how to proceed, they stared silently at each other. Cap had always believed that Empaths didn't carry weapons. This pretty, chestnut haired girl couldn't be more than 18 years old. Her long straight tresses covered the spot on her jacket where the Empathic Emblem was usually worn, causing Cap to doubt she was the one he sought. Not wanting to frighten her any more than he already had, Cap tried to explain. "I'm Commander Caplin Taylor. I'm looking for an Empath that is headed for the Western Hunting Lodge."
"My name is Kendra; I am the Empath you seek." She answered cautiously, still holding the blade. A noise from the brush drew her attention as a small rodent pounced out, trying to evade an unseen predator. Cap was just close enough to lurch forward and snatch the dirk from her hand. Her head jerked back in alarm.
"Bosen May has been mauled by a Sraeb, his shoulder is a mass of pulp." Cap spoke quickly not wanting to hesitate any longer.
That was all Ke ~ Alaina Stanford

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar. ~ Ridley Scott

You'd be surprised what an eleven-year-old can get away with." - Tuppence ~ Richard Due

Even if such beauty wasn't meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn't take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful. ~ Kyle West