A Quote by Liu Cixin
Like most genres of literary expression, science fiction in China was subject to instrumentalist impulses and had to serve practical goals.
Related Quotes
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.
I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.
It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.
Science will stagnate if it is made to serve practical goals.
Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
I had decided after 'Hollow Man' to stay away from science fiction. I felt I had done so much science fiction. Four of the six movies I made in Hollywood are science-fiction oriented, and even 'Basic Instinct' is kind of science fiction.
China lacks good science fiction, but not mediocre science fiction. Even so, the gap between Chinese and American sci-fi is still very large and it is most apparent in quality of the works.
Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.
I read a lot of science fiction, but I also mixed it up with a lot of other genres: crime, literary fiction, as well as nonfiction. Author-wise, I'm a fan of Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Robert McCammon, Raymond Chandler, Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Gail Simone, among many others.
I often use detective elements in my books. I love detective novels. But I also think science fiction and detective stories are very close and friendly genres, which shows in the books by Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, and Glen Cook. However, whilst even a tiny drop of science fiction may harm a detective story, a little detective element benefits science fiction. Such a strange puzzle.
Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations.
I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.
I loved literary science fiction. In fact, as a kid, when I was reading science fiction, I thought 'I can't wait for the future when the special effects are good' to represent what was in these books by Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Jack Vance.
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it
I think readers nowadays are happy to have genres blurred. We're seeing that on screen too: The Pirates of the Caribbean mashes up history and fantasy, Cowboys and Aliens mixes the Western and the Science Fiction genres.
Related Authors
Ai Weiwei Quotes
Chinese
Artist
Andrew Ng Quotes
Chinese
Scientist
Ang Lee Quotes
Chinese
Director
Confucius Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Gene Luen Yang Quotes
Chinese
Novelist
Jack Ma Quotes
Chinese
Businessman
Jackie Chan Quotes
Chinese
Actor
Joshua Wong Quotes
Chinese
Activist
Lao Tzu Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Laozi Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Lin Yutang Quotes
Chinese
Novelist
Mao Zedong Quotes
Chinese
Leader
Mencius Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Sun Tzu Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher
Watchman Nee Quotes
Chinese
Author
Zhuangzi Quotes
Chinese
Philosopher