Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

- Robert J. Sawyer

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

- Robert J. Sawyer

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

- Robert J. Sawyer

We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.

- Robert J. Sawyer

People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that.

- Robert J. Sawyer

You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.

- Robert J. Sawyer

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.

- Robert J. Sawyer

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

- Robert J. Sawyer

If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.

- Robert J. Sawyer

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.

- 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

A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

- Robert J. Sawyer

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

- Robert J. Sawyer

There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff.

- Robert J. Sawyer

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.

- Robert J. Sawyer

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.

- Robert J. Sawyer

By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

- Robert J. Sawyer

When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn't.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

- Robert J. Sawyer

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.

- Robert J. Sawyer

When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

- Robert J. Sawyer

An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.

- Robert J. Sawyer

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.

- Robert J. Sawyer

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

- Robert J. Sawyer

I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.

- Robert J. Sawyer

You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.

- Robert J. Sawyer

In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.

- Robert J. Sawyer

A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

- Robert J. Sawyer

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

- Robert J. Sawyer

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

- Robert J. Sawyer

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

- Robert J. Sawyer

It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.

- Robert J. Sawyer

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

- Robert J. Sawyer

You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.

- Robert J. Sawyer

We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.

- Robert J. Sawyer