Robert J. Sawyer

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.

It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.

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.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

The standard model of particle physics says that the universe consists of a very small number of particles, 12, and a very small number of forces, four. If we're correct about those 12 particles and those four forces and understand how they interact, properly, we have the recipe for baking up a universe.

You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.

The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It's 38 percent of Earth's gravity - about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that's got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that's not the case.

I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

Science fiction is the WikiLeaks of science, getting word to the public about what cutting-edge research really means.