Jerry Pournelle Quotes

I haven't yet written a book in a far-future utopia, where all bad things are eliminated, but it would be fun to do that one day and introduce some subversion.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

In really, really good science fiction, the line between the science and the fiction is blurry.

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Science fiction writers aren't in the prediction business; they're in the speculation business, using 'hasn't happened' or 'hasn't happened yet' to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities.

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

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.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.

Science fiction is not formulaic.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.

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

If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction.

'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.

Only when my 'Punktown'-based stories began seeing print did I demonstrate my proclivity for blurring the borders between horror, science fiction, and other genres.

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

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