Best quotes by Robert J. Sawyer on Science

Checkout quotes by Robert J. Sawyer on Science

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

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

  - Robert J. Sawyer
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.

  - Robert J. Sawyer
  

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

  - Robert J. Sawyer
  

• ‟ Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

  - 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
  

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

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

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

  - Robert J. Sawyer