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" An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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" We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I've had many of my books optioned. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

Science Fiction

" Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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

" When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Science Fiction

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism. "

Robert J. Sawyer