A biography for Robert J. Sawyerhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.”
“It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.”
“Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.”
“Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.”
“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.”
“I've had many of my books optioned.”
“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.”
“When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.”
“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.”
“Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.”
“I am very pro-science.”
“The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.”
“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.”
“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.”