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" 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

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" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

" Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go. "

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

" 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. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

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 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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" When I first started, my novels were set in the far future. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 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

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

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

" One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!' "

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

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

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