Quotes & Sayings About Writing Science Fiction

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

As a woman writing SF, I felt I had to think and write like a man in order to be taken seriously. — Heidi Ruby Miller

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels. — Daniel H. Wilson

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. — Philip K. Dick

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader. — Karen Joy Fowler

We say, "Well, the only answer is ... " or, "If you would just ... " Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don't see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don't think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction. — Frank Herbert

You know, I think some people fear that if they like the wrong kind of book, it will reflect poorly on them. It can go with genre, too. Somebody will say, "I won't read science fiction, or I won't read young adult novels" - all of those genres can become prisons. I always find it funny when the serious literary world will make a little crack in its wall and allow in one pet genre writer and crown them and say, "Well Elmore Leonard is actually a real writer." Or "Stephen King is actually a really good writer." Generally speaking, you know you're being patronized when somebody uses the word "actually — Elizabeth Gilbert

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about. — Octavia E. Butler

It's interesting how many science fiction writers get going when they are very young. I was on a program with Greg Bear and he mentioned that he had gotten started writing when he was eight. And I began writing when I was 10. I think we're influenced by the stuff, we find it and we love it and we're influenced by it ... I know I collected my first rejection slip when I was 13, and I went on collecting them for a long time after that. — Octavia Butler

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened. — Joanna Russ

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow! — John Gaver

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact. — A.E. Van Vogt

When I first started drawing the earliest incarnation of 'Optic Nerve,' I hadn't even been on a date; I hadn't had a romantic relationship of any kind yet, so in a way, I was almost writing science fiction. — Adrian Tomine

Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion! — L. Ron Hubbard

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest. — Octavia Butler

If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence.
"On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are. — Walter Mosley

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life. — Bruce Sterling

If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick... — Barry James Hickey

It's been suggested that most women fail to write significantly because the female mind is viscerotonic, and occupied almost exclusively with the moment-to-moment reality of emotions. If this is true, literature's loss is science fiction's gain, for Out of Bounds, Judith Merril's collection of short stories, is a warm and colorful rendering of the minutiae of the future. — Alfred Bester

[ ... ]i'm not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have [ ... ] I'm trying to say I've invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that's fantastic. But if not, isn't this a cool monster? — China Mieville

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction. — Aleksandar Hemon

Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well. — Kurt Vonnegut

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. — Irvine Welsh

Myths grew from the ancient tradition of passing on knowledge orally, the only means of doing so before writing.
They're narratives of human existence. They helped our ancestors interpret reality, solve problems, and guided social behavior. They structured natural and social information into patterns using symbols, and embedded fact into story form. This increased their impact, making information meaningful and personally involving - not just cold, detached facts. — Alan Joshua

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction. — Laurence Yep

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No. — John Scalzi

Nearly all the writing of our time is likely to disappear in a hundred years. Certainly most readers - and nearly all critics - feel that [Kurt] Vonnegut started to repeat himself, to grow increasingly self-indulgent and meandering, and to sometimes just blather in his later work. But his books up to "Slaughterhouse-Five" do possess a distinctiveness that will insure some kind of permanence, if only in the history of the 1960s and of science fiction. — Michael Dirda

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story. — Ben Bova

That was another thing people used to be able to do, which they can't do anymore: enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.
Quoth Mandarax:
Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!
- GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS — Kurt Vonnegut

Science fiction is what I point at when I say science fiction. — Damon Knight

The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. — Paul Di Filippo

You know, the way I feel, if I read a science fiction book by a new writer which is a lot better than what I do, instead of going on a bummer right away and saying, "Oh Christ, I'm obsolete, I'm outdated, I've lost it." I have this tremendous sense of joy. I don't have to write all the great goddamn science fiction in the world. Somebody else is going to carry this torch. It's such a relief to sit with my feet up on the wall and to know that if I never wrote another book science fiction is going ahead. — Philip K. Dick

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible. — Ray Bradbury

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write. — Michael Chabon

When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did. — Ted Chiang

I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling. — Peter Robinson

I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction. — Neil Gaiman

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. — Octavia E. Butler

For so long considered a second-rate category to other writing genres, Science Fiction should be allotted its true place in literature. The reason Science Fiction is so important is because SF authors create the future. They bring through ideas, technology, and new thought, put it all down in written and spoken word, and then send it out into mass consciousness. When enough people (a critical mass) think about and truly consider the plausibility of a concept, it becomes reality. Think William Gibson, who in 1982's "Burning Chrome" coined "cyberspace". Few grasped the concept at the time, but as the internet took hold in the 1990's, we not only had a word to describe our experience, we had a definition and an understanding, as well. Coincidence? — Joseph Duda

If we accept the premise that we're always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses ... and tell a good story. — James S.A. Corey

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. — Vernor Vinge

I go on writing in both respectable and despised genres because I respect them all, rejoice in their differences, and reject only the prejudice and ignorance that dismisses any book, unread, as not worth reading."
"On Despising Genres," essay — Ursula K. Le Guin

Good science fiction has its roots in good science. — Dan Brown

If you can read the book and say, 'Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!' That's Military Science Fiction." (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012) — Brandon Sanderson

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you.
If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego. — David Brin

I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious.
Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know.
Science fiction primarily uses the medium of physics and mathematics. It tells us how things work, or could work.
Horror taps into the darker imagery of the psychology, telling us what we should fear.
Fantasy, magic and myth, however, tap into the spiritual potential of the human life. Their medium is symbolism, truth made manifest in word pictures, and they tell us what things mean on a deep, internal level. I have always been a meaning-maker. I have always been someone who strives to make sense of everything and perhaps that is where my life as a storyteller first began. Life doesn't always make sense, but story must. And so I write stories, and the world comes right again. — Ripley Patton

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own. — Pamela Sargent

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it! — Terry Pratchett

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals - and the vitals of others - which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term - not more. Physiological - and even psychological analysis - can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing. — Clark Ashton Smith

When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.' — Jane Lindskold

[T]he only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships ... — Margaret Atwood

I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway. — Nigel Kneale

For those who resist the notion that the mainstream is a genre, we recommend that they browse the shelves of their local bookstore. For if the mainstream is not a genre, then it must necessarily embrace all kinds of writing: romance, adventure, horror, thriller, crime, and, yes, science fiction. — James Patrick Kelly

The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots. — Jon Spaihts

Although The Terminator is arguably the more visionary of the first two films, [ Terminator 2 ] is the more visually and viscerally satisfying. It's an exhausting experience and, even 18 years after its release (as I write this review), few films have matched it within the science fiction genre for sheer white-knuckle exhilaration. — James Berardinelli

I imagined a time when being gay is as unquestioned and un-judged as is having blue eyes. Some might call it fantasy or science fiction. I'd like to think it's the future. — Missouri Vaun

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction. — Cory Doctorow

Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte — Daniel LaMonte

I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system. — Gene Wolfe

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness ...
Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather than the content of the story. No society can embrace cultural sensitivity and retain full capacity for freedom of speech. — Scott M. Roberts

I probably spend more time writing than reading science fiction. I find that science-fiction literature is so reactive to all the literature that's gone before that it's sort of like a fractal. It's gone to a level of detail that the average person could not possibly follow unless you're a fan. It iterates upon many prior generations of iterations. — James Cameron

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl

I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. — Porochista Khakpour

It was the end of the October term of my sophomore year, and everything was petty normal, except for Social Studies, which was no big surprise. Mr. Dimas, who taught the class, had a reputation for unconventional teaching methods. For midterms he had blindfolded us, then had us each stick a pin in a map of the world and we got to write essays on wherever the pin stuck. I got Decatur, Illinois. Some of the guys complained because they drew places like Ulan Bator or Zimbabwe. They were lucky. YOU try writing ten thousand words on Decatur, Illinois. — Neil Gaiman

I came into science fiction at a very good time, when the doors were getting thrown open to all kinds of more experimental writing, more literary writing, riskier writing. It wasn't all imitation Heinlein or Asimov. And of course, women were creeping in, infiltrating. Infesting the premises. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Rod Clark has one of the most unique voices I have ever encountered. I still quote some of his political insights years later. To have him write political science fiction is both appropriate and intriguing. — Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. — Michael Chabon

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe. — Paul Di Filippo

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way. — Andy Weir

A moment later the scowling face of Admiral Jellico appeared on the screen. He looked as ill-humored as ever. Privately, Calhoun felt that somebody should send an away team into Jellico's ass, to determine just what had crawled up there and died years ago. — Peter David

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does. — Daniel Keys Moran

Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically ... impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't. — Jasper Fforde

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters. — Roger Zelazny

I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books. — T.S. Wieland

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it. — George R R Martin

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution. — Josh Trank

May it be written. May it be done. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

I was writing novels at eight. It was a science fiction epic, which went by the unimprovable title of 'Another Kind of Warrior.' I'd write it beginning to end, but when I'd finished it, I was another year older. The quality of writing and thought changed radically, so I'd start it again. I re-wrote that same book until I was 16. — Neil Cross

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.' — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

There are certain kinds of people who write science fiction. I think a lot of us married late. A lot of us are mama's boys. I lived at home until I was 27. But most of the writers I know in any field, especially science fiction, grew up late. They're so interested in doing what they do and in their science, they don't think about other things. — Ray Bradbury

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination. — Anthony Burgess

I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds. — David S.Goyer

I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality. — Scott Westerfeld

Think for a moment about the process that humans have used to record events throughout history. The first evidence we know of is paintings on cave walls. A little further along in time, after many intermediate steps, we see the development of writing. In the more recent past, we see the invention of the camera, audio recording devices, and ultimately video. The manner in which humans have recorded history (and to a lesser extent our own lives) has evolved. We've come a long way. Consider the implications of time. Much of the technology we take for granted today was pure science fiction 50-100 years ago, a dream 200 years ago, and inconceivable 500 years ago. Using these groupings of viewpoints, we can project into the future and categorize the possibilities. In — Todd William

Even when I'm writing about shape shifters and magical lands, I'm looking into my own heart. — Kay Kenyon

I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time. — Octavia Butler

[A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced. — Edmund Crispin

I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others. — Eric Diehl

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words - if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night - do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? — C.J. Cherryh

If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones. — Jane Espenson

All the definitions people want to put on you in terms of what kind of writer you are come with hidden meanings. If you're writing science fiction, you're writing rocket ships. If you write dystopian fiction, it's inequity where The Man must be fought. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn't excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century. — Walter Mosley

To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose. — Alan Joshua

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. — Ted Chiang

Notice how every science fiction movie or television show starts with a shot of the location where the story is about to occur. Movies that take place in outer space always start with a shot of stars and a starship. Movies that take place on another world always start with a shot of that planet. This is to let you know where you are. Novels and stories start the same way. You have to give the reader a sense of where he is and what's happening as quickly as possible. You don't want to start the story by confusing the reader. — David Gerrold

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation. — Chris Dee

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present. — Pamela Sargent