A Quote by Neil Gaiman

You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future. — © Neil Gaiman
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
There is an old saying: In history nothing is true but the names and dates. In fiction everything is true but the names and dates. The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
To be a science fiction writer you must be interested in the future and you must feel that the future will be different and hopefully better than the present. Although I know that most - that many science fiction writings have been anti-utopias. And the reason for that is that it's much easier and more exciting to write about a really nasty future than a - placid, peaceful one.
Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
It's just science fiction so it's allowed to be silly, and childish, and stupid. It's just science fiction, so it doesn't have to make sense. It's just science fiction, so you must ask nothing more of it than loud noises and flashing lights.
I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.
If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.
Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history. . . . All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago. All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written
In some ways I spend longer at non-fiction because there are a lot of different threads to bring together. But non-fiction is more reflective than immersive. The problem with fiction sometimes is that you have to leave the real world to enter the fictional one. And that takes so much, goes into your head for so long?.?.?.?I don't know, I just feel less inclined toward that these days, and more inclined to remain in my own life. I do like really good fiction, but it's getting harder to hold my attention in a novel.
Science fiction seldom attempts to predict the future. More often than not, it tries to prevent the future.
Science fiction is a weird category, because it's the only area of fiction I can think of where the story is not of primary importance. Science fiction tends to be more about the science, or the invention of the fantasy world, or the political allegory. When I left science fiction, I said "They're more interested in planets, and I'm interested in people."
The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.
Science always interested me, and science, real science, was more science fiction than science fiction.
We all know our dates of birth but . . . every year there is another date that we pass over without knowing what it is but it is just as important it is the other date the death date.
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.
My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.
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