Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Sometimes big budget means explosions! CGI! CGI, the possibilities are so limitless that it begins to be impractical. I'm more interested in the kinds of movies where the science fiction world has a set series of rules and you operate in it because of, maybe, constraints in the budget.
The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.
I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.
For us, the playground of fiction is just as important as reality
And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
Science fiction still is an idea genre.
There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.
Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.
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.
Science fiction is the very literature of change.
It's probably a form of childish curiosity that keeps me going as a fiction writer. I. . . want to open everybody's bureau drawers and see what they keep in there. I'm nosy.
In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.
When I did 'Battlestar Galactica' it was the first time I really understood science fiction. That was a very political drama, but set in spaceships so people didn't really take it seriously. But some really fascinating things were explored in that.
Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.
And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.
I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.