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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Even on the stage, I've played a bit of a persona, and the persona I played was a much brasher, more arrogant, less aware, less educated version of me.

I like flying to New York from London. It's like a day off for me. No phone or e-mails. Food, wine, iPod, movies, snoozing.

I think comedies should be short. I don't want to be self-indulgent; I don't want a two-hour comedy.