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" 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. "

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" One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Science

Think

Science Fiction

" There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff. "

" The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Childhood

" 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. "

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

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

I Am

Very

" 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

" 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

" We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more. "

" 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

Technology

Journalism

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad. "

" The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about. "

" 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. "

" Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you. "

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Artificial Intelligence

Intelligence

" 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. "

" 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. "

" One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life. "

" In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed. "

" The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries. "

" 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. "