People as me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
I wanted to be free to write the way I wanted to write, and my impression of Christian publishing, at least in fiction, was that there wasn't room for what I wanted to write.
I've always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.
Fiction is a branch of neurology
Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Justin Hermann is one of the best new voices in short fiction-deep and entertaining as hell, with many funny lines, unexpected turns of events, and great insights. Wonderful stories: each one is a trip!
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.
When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.
We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.
Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.
Fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
It's just the garbage ingarbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.
Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.
Great fiction can often present moral messages with greater power and clarity than instructional writing - since literature, after all, penetrates not just the intellect, but the imagination.
I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.
The best writing advice I had was [in] ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author) Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that had a big impact on me.
Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that.