Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's nothing I love more than a great truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story.
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told.
Fantasy/science-fiction stories have been around almost as long as each genre, but every hybrid now lives in the shadow of 'Star Wars.'
A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.
A science fiction story is just an attempt to solve a problem that exists in the world, sometimes a moral problem, sometimes a physical or social or theological problem.
Fantasy and science fiction stories are very applicable to talking to your children about the world. They tend to talk about the big questions regarding life and the universe.
It does sound like a science fiction story and I may sound like one of these guys who walks up and down with a sandwich board saying the end of the world is nigh, but the end is nigh.
If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
I could speculate, but it would be just speculation and the kind of thing that you would get in with a science fiction story. And if I was doing a science fiction story then I would come up with what can go wrong with this system.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me. To fall into a black hole, that is more amazing than anything I've ever read in a science-fiction story.
Who are we? And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, "Is there anyone else out there?" we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.
The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be 'future fairy tales'. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.