Sf Quotes

Three cable lines are still active in SF and these are as follows: California and the two Powell Cable Lines. The last two are most popular among locals and tourists as they even travel to the sheer area in the north, including the Lombard Street. Riding these cars can be pretty fun, but lines tend to be long at times especially during late mornings and afternoons. ~ Jennifer Bean

If this were some kind of entertainment, this would be roughly the point where Rupert said, "We don't have any more time, Professor, you must complete your research as soon as possible," but there was no great sense of urgency, no sense that it even mattered. It was just something that Rudi was interested in, for his own reasons. They could be working on this for years and still not understand it, and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference.
He said, "Look, Professor, a lot of effort went into getting you that information. We'd be grateful if you could make some kind of sense of it reasonably soon.
"There is one thing I can tell you right now," Lev said..."Whoever is running this thing, they're really interested in railways. ~ Dave Hutchinson

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. ~ Joe Murray

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. ~ Ted Chiang

I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction
even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons. ~ Kage Baker

My personal belief is that attraction to SF/F is coded right into your genes. I was attracted to monsters and robots as far back as I can remember. ~ Will McIntosh

Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course. ~ Hal Duncan

very early in Moderan the mighty Stronghold masters had solved for themselves the flesh-woman question, or, to be more precise, the wife-nuisance roadblock. And for that I honor them. I mean, my beamish hat is off to them, for that was QUITE a solving! We have no such problem, of course, in the essence times. If I don't like the beams of the woman I'm with, or if I like too much the beams of the woman I'm with and she won't reciprocate, I just signal back to the Love Dictator's office my discontent and he orders one of his little clerk mechanics to call the old beams home, and the Love Dictator then transmits me, personally, a new package. ~ David R. Bunch

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it! ~ Terry Pratchett

What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one. ~ Edward M. Lerner

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. ~ Alan Dean Foster

The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there. ~ Samuel R. Delany

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. ~ Isaac Asimov

There are cultures on Earth that are more alien than some of the aliens in SF. ~ Catherine Asaro

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. ~ Lynn Abbey

The public library my parents took me to in Fort Worth had the children's section next to the SF/F section, so I was reading adult SF/F at a very young age. ~ Martha Wells

SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions. ~ John Sladek

Rover did not know in the least where the moon's path led to, and at present he was much too frightened and excited to ask, and anyway he was beginning to get used to extraordinary things happening to him. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

At its best, SF cinema is an allegorical site that invites the audience to safely examine and reflect on long-standing social issues in an unfamiliar setting, providing the possibility of viewing them in a new light. At its worst, the process of allegorical displacement invites audiences to affirm racist ideas, confirm racial fears, and reinforce dubious generalizations about race and the place of African Americans in U.S. society without employing overt racial language or explicit imagery. ~ Adilifu Nama

Science works as a way to make sense of life and the universe. Hard SF as my preferred fictional genre just feels natural. ~ Edward M. Lerner

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.' ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

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. ~ Pamela Sargent

I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine ~ Philip K. Dick

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. ~ J.G. Ballard

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves. ~ Ellen Datlow

I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example. ~ Stanley Schmidt

As its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we cant predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe. Poised between intransigent scepticism and uncritical credulity, it is par excellence the literature of the open mind. ~ John Brunner

The last man she'd dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: 'I don't know, maybe I'm boring, but I never really feel like you're there when we're out to dinner. You live in your head. I can't. No room for me in there. I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.'

She had hated him at the time, and hated herself a little, but later, looking back, Hutter had decided that even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would've been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would've passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy. ~ Joe Hill

I believe modern SF needs to at least be aware of the singularity, if only so that it can dismiss it intelligently (or work around it). But I suspect the singularity is like faster-than-light travel for the IT generation. We may hope for it, and the rules don't forbid it, but we don't know how to do it yet (and it may not be possible). ~ Charles Stross

Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative. ~ Janet Morris

You can use logic to justify just about anything, that's its power and it's flaw. ~ Captain Katherine Janeway

I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick's coffee. ~ Hal Duncan

The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite - sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

ME/CFS has a greater negative impact on functional status and well-being than other chronic diseases, e.g., cancer or lung diseases[8], and is associated with a drastic decrement in physical functioning[9]. In a comparison study[10] ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower than patients with hypertension, congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and multiple sclerosis (MS), on all of the eight Short Form Health Survey (SF-36)[11] subscales. As compared to patients with depression, ME/CFS patients scored significantly lower on all the scales, except for scales measuring mental health and role disability due to emotional problems, on which they scored significantly higher. ~ Frank Twisk

I was a student at SF State, and I honestly didn't know where I was headed. I thought maybe something in the social sciences. But I happened to be living with a group of people, and one person was a film student. I was always keen on and aware of what she was doing. ~ Lisa Cholodenko

Well, my mother always told me that reading SF would rot my mind, ruin my morals, and lead me into hanging around with disreputable characters. And thank God, she was right!" -- Bruce Arthurs ~ Bruce Arthurs

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. ~ Stanley Schmidt

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he or she probably can't characterize aliens well either. ~ Robert J. Sawyer

I was only eight when Sputnik was launched, and at that age the boundary between science and fiction is pretty blurry. Whichever way the process ran, I've been a fan of science and SF ever since. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds. ~ Stanley Schmidt

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. ~ Spider Robinson

In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy. ~ Brian W. Aldiss

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right. ~ Karl Schroeder

Attempting to define science fiction is an undertaking almost as difficult, though not so popular, as trying to define pornography ... In both pornography and SF, the problem lies in knowing exactly where to draw the line. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Ray Bradbury's entire oeuvre exemplifies the crumbling of SCIENCE FICTION into the open interplay of science fiction, fantasy and horror. ~ Hal Duncan

John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective - a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. ~ Peter Watts

To write good SF today ... you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams. ~ Gardner Dozois

GOOD WILL
YOU MARK BELOW
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES ~ John Crowley

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything. ~ George R R Martin

I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts. ~ Hilton Als

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. ~ John Sladek

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed. ~ Angela Carter

That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have. ~ Frederik Pohl

SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF! ~ Kingsley Amis

I had said that Le Guin's worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they would be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it's rare in SF. ~ Jo Walton

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds. ~ Paul Di Filippo

Sci-fi uses the images that sf - starting with H.G. Wells - made familiar: space travel, aliens, galactic wars and federations, time machines, et cetera, taking them literally, not caring if they are possible or even plausible. It has no interest in or relation to real science or technology. It's fantasy in space suits. Spectacle. Wizards with lasers. Kids with ray guns. I've written both, but I have to say I respect science fiction enough that I wince when people call it sci-fi. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. ~ M. John Harrison

Practically all SF is trash. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Kate looked like the last strand of her patience was about to snap. She took in a breath, pumping her hands into fists.

"Aaron. Go upstairs. Gather your things, or so help me, I'll–"

"What?" Aaron challenged. "You'll do what? Yell at me? Raise your hand again?" His green eyes slit with rage. "Go ahead. Maybe this time you'll actually hit me. ~ S.F. Mazhar

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

Answer me immediately or I'll start cutting away everything that's pretty on you ... and then put it back. ~ Richard Finney

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image. ~ Paul Di Filippo

In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires. ~ Ann Aguirre

He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. ~ Neal Stephenson

I'm a geek. I love SF and fantasy. I listen to metal. I follow the Oakland Raiders and the Orlando Magic. ~ John Joseph Adams

I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit. ~ Chris Wooding

In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we're used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they're supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes. ~ Ann Leckie

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ~ Foz Meadows

She would share these feelings with him [her SF husband] later...after wisdom replaced anger. ~ Horse Soldiers

Linguistics is our best tool for bringing about social change and SF is our best tool for testing such changes before they are implemented in the real world, therefore the conjunction of the two is desirable and should be useful. ~ Suzette Haden Elgin

To my surprise, the sensation of query filled my stomach, spreading through to every corner. This was followed by each point of query ending at the same answer. Device Nineteen had responded to the question by coming to the conclusion that oblivion was the end of every path.
Great. My roommate's an emo.>
My stomach reviewed the comment and rumbled queries to various parts of the diamond, but most were returned unanswered because the required systems were not yet online. ~ J. Cameron McClain

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. ~ Greg Egan

If you can read the book and say, 'Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!' That's Military Science Fiction." (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012) ~ Brandon Sanderson

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user. ~ Isaac Asimov

The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are found in other forms of fiction - in the novel of ideas, in the historical novel, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists; but the best SF does this all more searchingly, by taking what is in most people only a moment of wonder and rebellion against the arbitrariness of existence and making of it an art enriched by knowledge and possibility, expressing our deepest human longing to penetrate into the dark heart of the unknown. ~ George Zebrowski

Tessa and I started out with conflicting realities, found that when each of us reality-tested the other's, it collapsed. But now, instead of mutually destroying each other's realities, we are shaping a joint one between us. If two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too. This is the idios kosmos, the private dream, contrasted to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are beginning to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos - which scares us, its insubstantiality - and the more than mere vapor quality of the hallucination. Like sf, a third reality is formed halfway between. ~ Philip K. Dick

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers ... .This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming. ~ Philip K. Dick

To my mind, the best SF addresses itself to problems of the here and now, or even to problems which have never been solved and never will be solved - I'm thinking of Philip K. Dick's work here, dealing with questions of reality, for example. ~ John Sladek

I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Many a fine SF story uses science or technology merely as backdrop. Many a fine SF story presumes a technological breakthrough and explores its implications without attempting to predict how the thing might actual work. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.'
Sam held out his hand. Give me some tobacco and a paper. ~ Roger Zelazny

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. ~ Jack McDevitt

For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone. ~ Walter Jon Williams

Given the issues with certain SF/F trophies (like the World Fantasy Award, which is 1) butt-ugly and 2) based on one disgustingly racist dude), all trophies from this point forward should be made out of LEGO. That way if you don't like it, you can just make it into something else. ~ Jim C. Hines

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird. ~ China Mieville

I didn't read much SF as a kid - I was a total Tolkien geek - but I started reading Samuel Delany and Angela Carter and Ursula LeGuin in high school, and I was definitely taken with the notion that here was a literature that could explore various notions of gender identity and how it affects the culture at large. ~ Elizabeth Hand

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. ~ Paul Di Filippo

When I moved to SF in my early 20s, I loved it, but I was absolutely astonished to discover that people there hated L.A. I was just like why? Really? I had no idea. ~ Matthew Specktor

I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions. ~ Karl Schroeder

What kind of hard SF do I write? Everything from near-future, Earth-centric techno-thrillers to far-future, far-flung interstellar epics. ~ Edward M. Lerner

Science fiction long assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (much to its benefit), while fantasy long since assimilated the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (much to my boredom). ~ Hal Duncan

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn't really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn't really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre's origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn't post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there's no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there's nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there's nothing wrong with SF getting called 'dystopia' when it's marketed to teenage girls, because girls don't read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.


It's not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the wor ~ Foz Meadows

'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. ~ Eric Brown

I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books. ~ F. Paul Wilson

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. ~ Stanley Schmidt

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. ~ Larry Niven