quotations about science fiction
As science fiction writers began to get their first glimmerings of the kind of power that computers might someday control, their immediate reaction was one of panic. Even through the 1960s, this view of computers as powerful gods did not change; it only became more sophisticated. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story that began with every telephone on earth ringing at the same time. Over the course of the next few hours, there were an extraordinary number of plane crashes and accidents. The punch line of the story was that the communications network that linked every machine on the planet into one vast consciousness had finally "awakened." The ringing of the phones was the birth cry of the baby and the crash of the planes was its first attempt to play. And so on. The idea was this: When the consciousness wakes up, watch out.
DAVID GERROLD
InfoWorld, July 5, 1982
I hate the whole ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.
DAVID BRIN
interview, Locus, March 1997
I think science fiction still suffers from bad PR from the days when it was considered the domain of nerds and geeks.
CAT SPARKS
"Is the tide turning for Australian sci-fi on the small screen?", The Conversation, August 29, 2017
I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.
STEPHEN HAWKING
"Information Loss in Black Holes", July 2005
Science fiction is often in danger of disappearing up its own a** with involved, too-fussy lore.
NICK WANSERSKI
"In its best episode yet, The Orville goes to trial for a baby's happiness", AV Club, September 21, 2017
Science fiction and the world. They have created each other.... We live, indisputably, in a science fiction world.
JAMES GUNN
Alternative Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
There's a surprising core of fandom that just hates any kind of religion in their science fiction. They really don't want to mix these things together. I'm not quite clear what that's about and why they're so opposed to mixing these things. It becomes a very purist argument. People will say, "If there's any kind of religion in it, it's not science fiction anymore." Well, I don't really buy that. People believe in religions and there are weird, mysterious things that happen in the universe. Why not play with that, too? Why isn't that just as valid as everything else that's part of the human condition, which is theoretically what sci-fi is supposed to be exploring.
RONALD D. MOORE
"You Ask The Q's, Ronald D. Moore Answers, Part 2"
Science fiction that's just about people wandering around in space ships shooting each other with ray guns is very dull. I like it when it enables you to do fairly radical reinterpretations of human experience, just to show all the different interpretations that can be put on apparently fairly simple and commonplace events. That I find fun.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
"Douglas Adams: The First and Last Tapes", Darker Matter: Online Science Fiction Magazine
Science fiction is a very special form of auditorium. It's a theater, a box, within which anything goes--but you'd better draw up the guidelines and the rule book before you begin. Otherwise, you end up with nonsense.
RIDLEY SCOTT
"The Replicant: Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner 2049", Wired, September 19, 2017
It's essential to remember that science fiction is not fantasy but could be future reality.
HARSHIKAA UDASI
"The thrill of science fiction", The Hindu, September 12, 2017
I suppose that literature as it is won't die, science fiction included. But games are becoming an extremely important part of the science fiction world, including games that are adapted from books (or vice versa: books that are adapted from games). It's wonderful to have the opportunity to play and see your favorite characters on the screen, but the opportunity to read a book does not become less attractive.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
interview, Strange Horizons, November 28, 2011
I get the feeling that we're living in sci-fi
I get the the feeling that our weapons are lo-fi
Ain't no killer like pride
SWITCHFOOT
"The War Inside"
One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Telegraph, December 2, 2013
Lightship lover
Interplanetary other
Sci-fi brother
If you are somewhere above us
Airwave raver
Cybercrazed savior
Pest resistant, optimistic, send me a sign
I'm a low-meg rapper
Fertile futuristic flapper
Regenerating cells and
Sending out spells
Hear me now, I'm an alien lover
LUSCIOUS JACKSON
"Alien Lover"
Science has from the beginning been ... the handmaiden of capitalism. SF has all along been the handmaiden of, as well as the parasite on, science. This is a treason to the profession of writing, which in its serious forms can be a handmaiden of nothing but disdain for, and assault upon, that-which-is.
BERNARD WOLFE
afterword, "Biscuit Position"
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
SUSAN SONTAG
"The Imagination of Disaster", Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.
BRIAN ALDISS
Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction
A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge -- everything that ever happened is still here.
ROBERT REED
Locus Magazine, April 1998
I've met many people who are very proud that they only read nonfiction, and I feel very sad for them, because we have to be able to imagine something else. In science fiction, we don't have to stay contained within what is possible. We can start with the question "What do we want?" rather than the question "What is realistic?"
WALIDAH IMARISHA
"Why Science Fiction Is a Fabulous Tool in the Fight for Social Justice", The Nation, June 2, 2015
The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ... soon.
VERNOR VINGE
"The Coming Technological Singularity"