Top 100 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. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.
John Sladek
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. For many readers, writers, editors and agents ... pretty much the working (in)definition: SF is short for So Fuck?
Hal Duncan
#41. 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
#42. I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.
Sarah Zettel
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
George Stephen
#53. 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
#54. For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
Walter Jon Williams
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.
Karl Schroeder
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
Piers Anthony
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. There are cultures on Earth that are more alien than some of the aliens in SF.
Catherine Asaro
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Today's hard news stories were yesterday's dystopian SF. Rereading
Pat Cadigan
#78. '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
#79. 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.
Alan Dean Foster
#80. In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.
Brian W. Aldiss
#81. I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting.
Roger Zelazny
#82. I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.
Jack L. Chalker
#83. The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
China Mieville
#84. 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.
Walter Jon Williams
#85. 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
#86. My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.
Charles Stross
#87. 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
#88. Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
John Sladek
#89. 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
#90. Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
China Mieville
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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.
Greg Egan
#94. I had a respected SF writer call me 'girlie' and demand that I get him a coffee, before the panel we were on together.
Ann Aguirre
#95. I'm told my SF is of the hard variety and my Fantasy is romantic but hopefully all the characters are strong and the plots are lively.
Sarah Zettel
#96. Peter Watts delivers-solid, inventive hard sf about the deep sea, but as we've never seen before. This moves like the wind.
Gregory Benford
#97. SF's NO GOOD!
They bellow 'til we're deaf
But =this= is good
Well, then, it's not SF!
Kingsley Amis
#98. Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down ...
Brian Aldiss
#99. SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.
Neal Stephenson
#100. Many people have tried to define science fiction. I like to call it the literature of exploration and change. While other genres obsess upon so-called eternal verities, SF deals with the possibility that our children may have different problems. They may, indeed, be different than we have been.
David Brin
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