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" All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence. "

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" Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Political

Talking

Science

" I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own. "

" I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction. "

" Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles. "

" Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology. "

" You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets. "

" If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited. "

" My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales. "

" Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that. "

" Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies. "

" When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic. "

" What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader. "

" Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology. "

" When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all. "

" It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't. "

" Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about. "

" George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Success

Classic

" The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont. "

" Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear. "

" I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada. "

" A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route. "

" Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it. "

" Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto. "

" I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people. "

" I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator. "

" Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means. "

" Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. "

" I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here. "

" Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being. "

" Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Wild

Power