A Quote by Robert J. Sawyer

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

Robert J. Sawyer

Quote Topics

About Condition Conduct Experiments Fiction Gets Human Human Condition Impractical Life One Of The Things Real Real Life Science Science Fiction Things Thought Unethical Would Would Be

Quote Author

Robert J. Sawyer
Canadian - Writer
Born: April 29, 1960

I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.

Charles Stross

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own, in order to investigate by way of pleasurable thought-experiments how things might be done differently.

Brian Stableford

Science fiction is essentially a kind of fiction in which people learn more about how to live in the real world, visiting imaginary worlds unlike our own in order to investigate, by way of pleasurable thought-experiments, how things might be done differently.

Brian Stableford

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

Rudy Rucker

It is unethical not to know. It is unethical not to think. It is unethical not to love. It is unethical not to live an impassioned life. It is unethical not to attain greatness. It is unethical to succumb to the fear of envy and the conspiracy of mediocrity. It is unethical not to self-bestow genius. It is unethical not to be the first monkey.

Yasuhiko Kimura

Bradbury would have said his plots are myths and metaphors that tell stories about the human condition. That's what sets him apart from other science-fiction writers: He doesn't write about technology, but about the human heart and psyche.

Sam Weller

The beauty of science fiction is its open canvas. You can hypothesize about any element of the world. It doesn't have to be laser battles and things exploding, you can be JG Ballad and maybe just change one little thing about the real world and that becomes science fiction.

Duncan Jones

I've loved science fiction my whole life. But I've never made a science fiction movie. And it's [World Of Tomorrow] sort of a parody of science fiction at the same time. It's all of the things I find interesting in sci-fi amplified.

Don Hertzfeldt

One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.

Alastair Reynolds

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.

Michio Kaku

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.

Philip K. Dick

I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things.

Richard Dawkins

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

William Gibson

I do think that science fiction ideas are best expressed through visual media like film and TV. Realist literature depicts things that we have seen in life, but science fiction is different: what it depicts exists only in the author's imagination. When it comes to science fiction, the written word is inadequate.

Liu Cixin

One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.