One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
I can’t imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.
I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list – the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.
I don’t much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
I assume that – because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities – I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I’ve never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.
I can’t do fiction unless I visualize what’s going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.
I was afraid to watch ‘Blade Runner’ in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.
I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
All my life I’ve encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn’t afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby.
Television has – particularly at the HBO level in the United States – become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing – there was no equivalent to that medium before. It’s like a new way of telling stories.
I’m interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I’m often amazed they don’t quite seem to have a sense of where they’re from. They’re like the citizens of the airport.
I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
I don’t think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
I’ve always been interested in people who aren’t from anywhere in particular. I think it’s all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.
Silently, like thoughts that come and go, the snowflakes fall, each one a gem.