Sf Quotes

#1. 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.

Bob Shaw

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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.

Dan Simmons

#8. [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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Paul Di Filippo

#13. What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.

Edward M. Lerner

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

Paul Di Filippo

#18. 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

#19. A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.

Frederik Pohl

#20. Fiction that fails to engage an audience with the emotional intricacies of viable characters will, for many in that audience, simply alienate them with its profound irrelevance at the human level.

Hal Duncan

#21. 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

#22. Step up to red alert."
Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb."
- Rimmer & Kryten, "Red Dwarf

Rob Grant

#23. I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.

Edward M. Lerner

#24. 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.

Kim Harrison

#25. It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

Isaac Asimov

#26. SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.

John Sladek

#27. 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

#28. I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don't accidentally walk through into another dimension.

Steven Wright

#29. I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E.
van Vogt.

Philip K. Dick

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

Richard Finney

#31. A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.

Adam Roberts

#32. 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.

Stanley Schmidt

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"
"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

Roger Zelazny

#36. For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.

Hal Duncan

#37. 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

#38. A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

Alastair Reynolds

#39. 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

#40. From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.

Samuel R. Delany

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The SF [Supreme Fascist, i.e. God] created us to enjoy our suffering. The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.

Paul Erdos

#45. GOOD WILL
YOU MARK BELOW
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES

John Crowley

#46. Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

Rudy Rucker

#47. Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

Brian Aldiss

#48. 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

#49. For many readers, writers, editors and agents ... pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck?

Hal Duncan

#50. The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

Paul Di Filippo

#51. I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.

Sarah Zettel

#52. 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

#53. As long as they let me just talk to the kids, about stuff like, I don't know, knife usage, field medicine for beginners. How to make the night sky your ally, with the Big Dipper a place to hang your hat, and Orion your friend to guide you home. That's what I would have wanted to hear, back then ...

Terry Pratchett

#54. AI will begin as Artificial Idiocy. Who cares if a computer can play chess or take control of cyberspace? Can it trash Tokyo, huh, huh?

Hal Duncan

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades.

Peter Watts

#59. 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

#60. Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is 'Star Wars' if not pure quill SF?

Paul Di Filippo

#61. 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

#62. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

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

Hal Duncan

#64. I've held my silence when I probably shouldn't have. But I was in the minority, a woman writing SF, and I was afraid of career backlash. I was afraid of being excluded or losing opportunities if I didn't play nice.

Ann Aguirre

#65. Trust me, I'm an SF medic.
This won't hurt ... me.
'You?'
I'm not so sure, it'll probably hurt a lot.

Jose N. Harris

#66. I do think that theater is a great venue for science fiction, and not just adaptations but also original work. I also think some of the greatest classics of theater have elements of SF, but in theater, as in publishing, sometimes people make arbitrary distinctions.

Edward Einhorn

#67. When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

George Stephen

#68. 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

#69. For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.

Walter Jon Williams

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. I have never written a book that I wouldn't want to read. The trouble is, I love to read horror, sf, fantasy, mysteries, hero pulps - romantic fiction, in the original, traditional meaning of that term, as opposed to mimetic fiction. But most of all, I love thrillers.

F. Paul Wilson

#73. As a woman writing SF, I felt I had to think and write like a man in order to be taken seriously.

Heidi Ruby Miller

#74. After all, he'd been in the United States Army Special Forces, fuck you very much. You might take the man out of the SF, you couldn't take the SF out of the man. He'd been up against some of the world's meanest and toughest. So, goddamn straight he could work his way around one young woman.

Laura Kaye

#75. One can revise the rules, shift the goal posts, but to do so is just to conjure a chimera and mask it as a novum.

Hal Duncan

#76. 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

#77. 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.

Edward M. Lerner

#78. The columns of mounted men moved forward, passed out through the gates of the Palace of Karma, turned off the roadway and headed up the slope that lay to the southeast of the city of Mahartha, comrades blazing like the dawn at their back.

Roger Zelazny

#79. 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

#80. I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine

Philip K. Dick

#81. 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.

Ann Aguirre

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

Karl Schroeder

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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.

Bruce Boxleitner

#86. I started the movement of SF in America in 1908 through my first magazine, 'MODERN ELECTRICS.' At that time it was an experiment. Science fiction authors were scarce. There were not a dozen worth mentioning in the entire world

Hugo Gernsback

#87. I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking.

Lev Grossman

#88. 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

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

Brandon Sanderson

#90. SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

Piers Anthony

#91. In a spectaculist fabrication, the cardinal rule is Shit Blows Up.

Hal Duncan

#92. Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately.

Walter M. Miller Jr.

#93. 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

#94. Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course.

Hal Duncan

#95. 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.

Walter Jon Williams

#96. There are cultures on Earth that are more alien than some of the aliens in SF.

Catherine Asaro

#97. 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

#98. The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

Pamela Sargent

#99. There's no possibility that foresight work will ruin my creativity. It goes to a different area than the creative wellspring of SF.

Karl Schroeder

#100. Today's hard news stories were yesterday's dystopian SF. Rereading

Pat Cadigan