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" When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant. "

Robert J. Sawyer

Science Fiction

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" 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'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. "

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

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

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" 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

" 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. "

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 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

" 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

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

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

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

" A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto. "

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

" Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity. "

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

" 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 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

" 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. "

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

" Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about. "

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

Robert J. Sawyer

" Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology. "

Robert J. Sawyer

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

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

Robert J. Sawyer