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" 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. "

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" 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

She

Wait

Need

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means. "

" 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

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

" 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

" 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. "

" You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers. "

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

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

" A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

Would

Write

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

" I am very pro-science. "

Robert J. Sawyer

I Am

Very

" 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. "