Paul Di Filippo Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk – a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts – in its own image. – Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare. – Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire possible. And yet what is ‘Star Wars’ if not pure quill SF? – Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic. – Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views – on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics – than Robert Heinlein. – Paul Di Filippo
Patrick Nielsen Hayden Tor.com has been a venue for original SF and fantasy since 2008, but we’ve never formalized our process for submissions. Indeed, for a long time, we were totally winging it. – Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Pamela Sargent The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it. – Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent 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. – Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault. – Pamela Sargent
Mitch Kapor If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s… there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley… and it crept northward in early 2000s. – Mitch Kapor
Mehcad Brooks I basically modeled my way through college, doing local runway shows in L.A. that don’t pay a lot and a couple of shows in N.Y. and S.F., and I probably made the same as the average 19-year-old waiter; I just worked less and was around beautiful girls, so it was nice. – Mehcad Brooks
Lynn Abbey I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I’ve never been able to sell. I’m known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre. – Lynn Abbey
