I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the tim...
I'm just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It's great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you're sitting at the edge of your seat and you find you...
I count myself fortunate to be able to contribute to this work; and the great interest which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has shown in my work and the recognition that it has paid to my past successes, convince me that I am not on the wrong ...
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mas...
Personally, I attach great importance to research in fundamental sciences because I believe that no applied or developmental research can do without basic research as the wellspring and driving force. But, in this world of ours, often because of mate...
Science is very good at answering the 'how' questions. 'How did the universe evolve to the form that we see?' But it is woefully inadequate in addressing the 'why' questions. 'Why is there a universe at all?' These are the meaning questions, which ma...
We have a lot of suspicion of robots in the West. But if you look cross-culturally, that isn't true. In Japan, in their science fiction, robots are seen as good. They have Astro Boy, this character they've fallen in love with and he's fundamentally g...
For me, a good thriller must teach me something about the real world. Thrillers like 'Coma,' 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'The Firm' all captivated me by providing glimpses into realms about which I knew very little - medical science, submarine tec...
About Grade 9 and Grade 10, I had a fantastic drama teacher, and it was one of the first subjects I actually felt that I was good at. I wasn't a mathematician. Didn't like science, any of those subjects. English and Drama were the two subjects that I...
I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at ...
I was always a very good student, 3.98 GPA... But once I found out I only had to take math and science for two years, I didn't take them junior or senior year. And I convinced my high school to give me actual credits for doing professional shows in M...
Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.
Having a super-brain does not suddenly make you a dictator of the world. So we don't have to fear the scenarios of science fiction where the Lex Luthors of the world take over. People with exceptional ability, they don't become politicians; they don'...
Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would ge...
Oddly enough, my favorite genre is not fiction. I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary...
The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That's just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their...
Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed...
The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in scien...
Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science...
One of the problems we've had is that the ICT curriculum in the past has been written for a subject that is changing all the time. I think that what we should have is computer science in the future - and how it fits in to the curriculum is something ...
What I love about sci-fi is that every generation's films are based on what we know at that point in time. We make movies about the future but it's always based on what we have. Then as science grows and we discover new things, so do our ideas. You k...
