I think the best way to have confidence is not to allow everyone else's insecurities to be your own.
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
You can't really predict the future. All you can do is invent it.
You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.
That's really what SF is all about, you know: the big reality that pervades the real world we live in: the reality of change. Science fiction is the very literature of change. In fact, it is the only such literature we have.
For someone to be taken seriously it was valuable to have the appearance of someone who deserved to be taken seriously.
One doesn't lose a self, like a pair of gloves or a pine. We learn and change, or we harden into stone.
America has an interesting global role, don't we? It certainly seems to be changing. Our government right now has a softer hand than we've had in the past, but I still think that we're the global behemoth.
These 150-minute superhero films that Hollywood is making are so concerned with their length that each scene doesn't have the time it needs to make sense.
You've got to experiment to figure out what works.