Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.
In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.
There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. 'Elysium' could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction,...
If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total...
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contempor...
Pauley Perrette: I was a criminal science fanatic and went to study it in college as well and I think that helped me on NCIS because I was comfortable with the language, I had studied criminal science in school for years.
Young people, those who think they're experts in science, there's no doubt. They just believe it, and so there has to be an explanation - and whatever man is doing has caused the jet stream to slow down, and that is permitting the polar vortex.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I do...
Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science depa...
I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
The ultimate aim of all science to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here, right under our feet.
When you hit 30, it's that time of self-reflection. Some people are a success. Some people feel like they haven't achieved what they wanted to. Some people are married, some have kids, some are still single.
Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial, and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now, every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot, and you see the local news, and th...
For me, I want to see diversity in storytelling sources because we live in a very diverse society, and the stories are for the whole society. That's really important. For me, as a female filmmaker, when I was out on the festival circuit on 2006, I fe...
I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.
It's one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies - with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples - should be among the bigg...
Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds.
These days the technology can solve our problems and then some. Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than 'able-bodied' folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.
I am fascinated by all the new technology that creates places for us to meet in what is called cyberspace. I understand what it must have meant for the rebellions in the 19th century, especially in 1830 and 1848, when the mass circulated newspaper be...
