We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.

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

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them.

You have to have confidence in where you're going. Don't live and die by the fans' tweets.

Bradbury was the one guy who was published in places like the 'Saturday Evening Post.' He was the guy who brought science fiction to the masses. If he hadn't existed, science fiction would have been a well-kept secret in literature instead of a widely consumed phenomenon.

I think there's always been, to some degree, a misunderstanding about what science fiction is all about, in that it has been judged by the general public as being literature of prediction, and it isn'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.

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.

People are looking for a simplicity in their fictional worlds where good and evil are clearly delineated, that you can't find in the real world, and that provides an enormous comfort - and that, I think, has an awful lot to do with the reason fantasy is so popular.

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

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

Science fiction's power, if it has any, is that it gives us reasonable extrapolations, not wild and woolly stuff.

I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.

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.

We're wired somehow to want to be part of something bigger. And we quest to understand what our role is.

The great thing about science fiction is that it transcends national boundaries.

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

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.

Print science fiction writers often do consulting for government bodies.

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

Everything is cross-platform now. That's part of the reality that we live in - a multifaceted, multimedia world - and I'm delighted to be a part of that.

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.

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.

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.

I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.

A writer needs to write, period. He or she can't wait for the muse, shouldn't need peace and quiet, and isn't entitled to perfect conditions or the perfect spot.

Science fiction has always been a means for political comment. H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds' wasn't about a Martian invasion - it was a critique of British colonialism, and... 'The Time Machine' is really an indictment of the British class system.

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

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.

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.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

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

Psychopathy might lurk behind the mask of sanity.

I'm a rationalist. And I can see no evidence for a benevolent and interventionist creator.

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

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

If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.

Traditionally, the science fiction reader has been the 16- to 24-year-old male, especially the male with an interest in technology.

By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.

There's always been a quality to being a science-fiction reader. Usually, you're the only one in your class, or there are only one or two in your whole town. You're always the guy who reads that strange stuff.

You can't be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.

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

An agnostic is someone who believes the nature of the Divine is unknowable... and in that sense, I'm willing to subscribe to being an agnostic.

One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.

When I started publishing - my first novel came out in 1990 - there were no options for publishing science fiction in Canada. There were no small presses, and the large presses simply would not touch it at all.

Science fiction should not be dismissed as escapism. It is a profound vehicle for talking about social and political issues.

Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism.