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" 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. "

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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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

" Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon. "

" 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. "

" I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't. "

" 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

Understand

Person

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

" Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity. "

" 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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Would

Write

" Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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'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

" There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted. "