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.

Whether it's created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.

I think most people are indifferent in their evaluation of what is good or bad.

Hard science fiction, which is what I write, often is rightly criticized for having either negligible or unbelievable characterization, but the science I've actually studied most post-secondarily is psychology, and characterization is the art of dramatizing psychological principles.

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.

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.

I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.

The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops... People don't tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists.

I'm often characterized as an optimistic writer, and certainly my 'Neanderthal Parallax' and 'WWW' trilogies shade toward the utopian. I like to think that's not simple naivete, but rather a reasonable approach.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

Real people are complex, contradictory, and have their own motivations - they can't just be mouthpieces for the writers' point of view.

If you look at the United States, most of the country is pretty much uninhabited.

The traditional route to success in science fiction is by making a name for yourself in short fiction, so people who read science fiction magazines will recognize your byline on a novel.

The general public still thinks that science fiction has nothing to do with their day-to-day lives.

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

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

The fact we exist merely means we exist. That's all it means.

I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.

My mother is an American.

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.

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.

In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.

I am very pro-science.

I've had many of my books optioned.

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.

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.

A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.

Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.