I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
A. B. Yehoshua
The literary trappings and moralizing of science fiction I find insufficiently compelling.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
A. E. van Vogt
It's great to be able to work on some science fiction. I love the genre.
Aaron Stanford
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
Adam Christopher
'Doctor Who' is where my love of science fiction and fantasy started. I was introduced to it when I was 8, and I'm still an avid viewer.
My own writing has perhaps more of an American flavor than a British one, but that's because the stories I've so far written have needed it. 'Empire State,' 'Seven Wonders' and 'The Age Atomic' are all very place-centric, where the setting itself is almost a character. But there is a universality to story that isn't just limited to science fiction.
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
I was born in California, raised a vegetarian, and love science fiction, so don't tell me how I need to be in order to fit your standards.
Aisha Tyler
I think the type of actor I am, I tend to play strong leading female characters. The shows I've been on happen to be science fiction genre.
Alaina Huffman
I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like that's because technology has caught up with us.
I used to read science fiction a lot, and I still like science fiction when it is a model of how we really are and to see ourselves from another perspective.
Alan Alda
NI love watching science fiction because I feel like when it's done well, it's not just monsters, but philosophy. Really good science fiction like, '2001,' for example, or the first 'Matrix.' But it takes someone who's got a brain and thinks in order to do really good science fiction.
Alan Arkin
It was hard for me to believe. I would look down and say, 'This is the moon, this is the moon,' and I would look up and say, 'That's the Earth, that's the Earth,' in my head. So, it was science fiction to us even as we were doing it.
Alan Bean
I think there's always been a traditionally apocalyptic side to British science fiction, from H.G. Wells onwards. I mean, most of Wells' stories are potentially apocalyptic in some sense or another.
Alan Moore
It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.
Alan Stern
Science fiction sometimes is fun because it reaches so far in the future.
Alan Taylor
We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.
Alastair Reynolds
I'm always a little bit cautious around invented terminology because so much science fiction is off-putting to the uninitiated. You open up the first page, and it's full of all these made-up words.
I am playing in a playground that's already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.
Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.
We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.
When I look back at many of the moments of wonder, awe, or terror that I've got from science fiction, it's often been because I've been put in the head of one of the characters.
I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.
There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.
My mother was a part of a reading group, but they would never come near science fiction because they think it's not for them.
Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.
'Doctor Who' is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me, and I'd probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one.
I'm not actually that bothered about the 'science fiction-ness' of 'Doctor Who.'
As a science fiction writer, it's hard to think of a more stirring theme than the origin and ultimate destiny of life in the universe.
A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships - though that never put me off.
Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.
I used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.
I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?
Most science fiction, quite frankly, is silly nonsense.
I was obsessed with movies when I was younger. During the summer, I would go by myself to a theater down the street from my house. I saw every comedy or science fiction movie that came out. My kids love going to the movies, but 3D scares them.
I think if I did do something in another genre, it would be science fiction; I'm a big sci fi nerd.
Science fiction is one of the smartest genres around because you have to have so much forethought.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
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.
Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.
I love science fiction, and one of the things I love about it is that it's so very different. You can read stuff that's just fast-paced adventure, and the characters are cardboard, but who cares, because they're heroes, and we love it. And you can read stuff that's really deep character, and everything in between.
I read way, way more Andre Norton than could possibly have been healthy. It was a short hop from her to the rest of the library's science fictional and fantastic holdings.
The 'science' in 'science fiction' isn't just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.
Science fiction is huge and varied, and there's almost any sort of book or story you might imagine.
Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.
The '70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.
When I was a kid, I had no perception whatever that science fiction was supposed to be a boys' club.
Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.
