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

Robert J. Sawyer

Science Fiction

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" 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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

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

" When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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

" 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

" 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

" The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer