Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.
I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.
Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.
I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.
Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.
It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.
No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.
I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.
When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.
When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.
My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.
I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.
I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.
So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.
But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.
When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.