[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood to it; but a myth is a ...
The question isn't whether it's SFW, the question is whether W is SF it.
SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
The most colorful section of a bookstore is the display of SF books, with art by people like Wayne Barlow, who is a terrific artist.
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.
The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are fo...
I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.
I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in - to demand! - a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.
I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.
When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
[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!
I grew up reading SF in the '70s and '80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds.
It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.
One SF prediction that I would like very much to see: Get solar collectors launched to beam energy back home, and get away from fossil fuels.
What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
