Nicolas Roeg Quotes

Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, 'Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.'

I wrote this book, '2030,' and I was careful in the book not to overdo the future because I don't think it comes that fast.

It's very strange writing science fiction in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

I don't put a very clear label on my work. If anything, I write science fiction - looking at a moment now, in the present, and then extrapolating outward to think about what the future might look like if this particular trend goes on, or if this particular trend is the most dominant. That's a science fictional tool.

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

Science fiction always has had strains of pessimism and optimism weaving through its historical development, sometimes one dominating and then the other, usually depending on the state of the world.

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.

I grew up reading SF in the '70s and '80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds.

The future's come and gone; it's a thing of the past. That once impossibly exotic expression 'the year 2000,' for so long evocative of silver suits and robots in pinnies, now feels antiquated.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

What science fiction does is take what might be possible someday and examine what might happen if it were - the drawbacks and the positive things.

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

I like to think readers appreciate a well-drawn near-future as well as a well-drawn far-future.

A feeling for history is almost an essential for writing and appreciating good science fiction, for sensing the connections between the past and future that run through our present.

Science fiction is becoming more of a diverse kind of genre.

You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

Science fiction is about worlds you don't know and worlds you can create, like in 'Avatar'.

Science fiction is my way of pushing the imagination onward. It's a way to understand how the world will look in the future.

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable.

It's great to be able to work on some science fiction. I love the genre.