Quotes of: Sf Keyword

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Dan Simmons

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

Larry Niven

Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.

John Sladek

An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.

Walter Jon Williams

...[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 patient...

The Wild Girls

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

Some people write letters, in the library.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.

Stanley Schmidt

[A]nother thing about myths: they gather in and circumscribe their target audience. They make a collection into a collective.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

Alan Dean Foster

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming

All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.

John Sladek

Many a fine SF story uses science or technology merely as backdrop. Many a fine SF story presumes a technological breakthrough and explores its implications without attempting to predict how the thing might actual work.

Edward M. Lerner

In those timeless years between infancy and, say, seven what is has always been: in that way children inhabit the realm of myth.

In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

Paul Di Filippo

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably mo...

Paycheck and Other Classic Stories

– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.

Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging.

Ender's World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender's Game

I get tired of hearing some science-fiction fans saying that characterization isn't important in SF. In point of fact, I think it's probably more important in SF than in mainstream fiction. After all, if the author can't characterize humans well, he ...

Robert J. Sawyer

SF has at least the advantage of not depending on preconceptions.

John Sladek