General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.
Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.
My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.
Technology has enabled government to have investigative and situational awareness on a scale and scope that were science fiction when the Stasi shut its doors.
We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
In my early teens, science fiction and fantasy had an almost-total hold over my imagination. Their outcast status was part of their appeal.
I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.
Millions of students now, in all the schools of America, are reading science fiction and especially, thank God, 'The Martian Chronicles.'
I have great faith in the future of books - no matter what form they may take - and of science fiction.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.
My hope is that in the future, women stop referring to themselves as 'the only woman' in their physics lab or 'only one of two' in their computer science jobs.
When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.
All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to co...
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.
Economics is uncertain because its fundamental subject matter is not money but human action. That's why economics is not the dismal science, it's no science at all.
