Robert J. Sawyer

Regrettably, with '2001' having a title that had a year in it, science fiction essentially set itself up in the public's imagination as saying, 'Here's what you get if you wait to that year.' Well, we all waited till that year, and we didn't get anything at all like that.

Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Grounding my work in the real world helps make that clear.

Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

When I first started, my novels were set in the far future.

When you're changing centuries, people get curious about the future.

When the state was going to tell you what your future would be, science fiction was irrelevant.

Science fiction has always used metaphors and disguises, talking about alien civilizations or the future.

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.