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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.