Science Fiction Authors

"I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived."

"In the ebb and flow of battle there are usually only brief flashes of bravery before the brave become the dead."

"When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally…"

"If you want pure science, crack open a textbook or buy a journal. Fiction is about people. To foreground people as opposed to science does not weaken the genre, it opens it up. Insisting on one incarnation of a phenomenon is antiscientific. Science observes phenomena and incorporates new manifestations into the corpus. “Real” science fiction reminds me of certain academics who are ossified in their little knowledge fiefdoms. The human factor is messy. The human factor cannot be quantified with P-values and Confidence Intervals. This horrifies some readers and writers, but I love it. There is nothing wrong with foregrounding science, but there is room in genre for every flavour. More variety leads to more fans. That can’t be a bad thing."

"Protagonists don’t have to be likable. They just have to be compelling. The key characteristic of a protagonist, whether they are conventionally good or evil, is that the reader must be interested in knowing what they will do next, or how they will respond to what happens to them. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much I detest all that ‘hero’s journey’ crap…"

"In her spare time, she looked to books or the stars for company."

"There was sadness in her, of course, but she didn't wish to crack like fine china either. She could not wither away. In the world of the living, one must live. And had this not been her wish? To live. Truly live."

"Mortals have always been frightened of the night's velvet embrace and the creatures that walk in it, and yet they find themselves mesmerized by it."

"Gothic has this slow, moody, syrupy sort of pace. That is what gives gothic its shape."

"white supremacy is like a horrible, dangerous cult, and like an infection. And it doesn’t just harm — I mean, it harms people of color definitely. Certainly African American people, Latinos, when somebody tries to hurt them, they are the most harmed. But I think it also harms the white people within. It’s a dangerous kind of place, I think, white supremacy. And if you get into it, you really start losing touch with reality, and it’s almost like you’re the member of a suicidal cult to me."

"Words are seeds, Casiopea. With words you embroider narratives, and the narratives breed myths, and there's power in the myth. Yes, the things you name have power."

"I think one of the problems that happens with representations of — well, I’ll say with Mexicans, but in general with Latin Americans — is that we only get one type of story told. In general, the type of story that you get if you’re Latin American and you’re reading something in the English language — because it’s different if you’re reading Spanish fiction — you don’t get any genre fiction at all. The stories that you can tell are very limited. Normally they limit you to the suffering illegal immigrant."

"I wasn’t very much interested in what is called gothic romance or a female gothic. I was always more into what is termed the male gothic, which is gothic books that have supernatural elements, graphic violence, and that kind of stuff. Sometimes we also call it gothic horror, as opposed to what we consider to be the female gothic, which is more like Scooby-Doo types of stories. Jane Eyre kinds of tales, in which a young woman goes to a distant location, meets some dude, and then there’s some kind of mystery to unravel. There is a happy ending — that is mostly the desire of that kind of story...It’s a liminal category, the gothic, and this is one side of it. But I was always more into the horror gothic. Into the Draculas of the world and the Carmillas."

"when we think about Mexican people, when we think about Latin American people. We don’t imagine them having full and interesting lives in the same way that we imagine white people having full and interesting lives. But they did...there’s all these nuances that get lost sometimes when you read these stories about us. And in every story that I write, I want to bring a little bit of that."

"He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams."

"Categories should not act as straitjackets, and yet the magic realism label has sometimes strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature."

"But does it matter what we call Latin American literature? Isn’t a rose by any other name just as sweet? In my experience, it matters because categories create expectations."

"In my experience, the term magic realism is often overused and stereotypical, spoken without much thought."

"I am partial to quiet, slow, psychologically intricate work."

"It’s never as fun seeing the monster as much as imagining."

"Magic realism once referred to the literary style of a loosely connected group of Latin American authors who penned works some 60 years ago, but in the English-speaking world, the term has become synonymous with Latin American writing in general. Picture every work by a British writer being called “Austenesque” today, and you get an idea of this phenomenon."

"I wish we had more nuanced, complex conversations about books. Why can’t we speak in expansive terms about genre and aesthetics? About mood and texture? About things that fit into categories and the ones that defy them?"

"People love to classify things as black and white, good or bad, but I’ve seldom met any one who can be neatly defined and classified…"

"The magic realism conundrum will not be resolved quickly or easily, but I believe a wider selection of books from writers with a Latin American heritage can help move us toward a world in which our vision of this region is vaster and richer. This is happening, albeit slowly."

"Telling is a component of many cultures and it’s certainly present in many classics of Latin American literature. Modern American literature doesn’t seem to value telling as much as it once did or as much as other cultures still do. It’s seen as a sign of gracelessness. But of course, folklore is spoken, and there are benefits of telling rather than showing…"

"Growing up in Mexico, we didn't have a dividing line between the fantastical and the literary, like you do in Canada, so it bled through. Therefore, my writing bleeds through categories and I enjoy the challenge of changing constantly, like molting out of a book."

"It's probably a lot better to imagine that you can deal with vampires and witches, because at least those, there's some ways to combat them. When you're talking about humans, there are no certain remedies for dealing with a band of roving soldiers."

"Thematically, I like to write quiet stories. I’m not a bang-bang kind of writer. I love, love Shirley Jackson. Stuff that is slow and builds up layer by layer. Sometimes my mother makes fun of me because of that. She’d rather that I have more shooting and spaceships going woooosh."

"when you come to places like Mexico and other states that were colonized, that question of race becomes very interesting because there's obviously a lot of race-mixing going on in these nations. And so it's not the same sort of eugenics that they're handling in Great Britain, where there is this great anxiety about miscegenation. It's a little bit different. It's still highly racist, but it's not exactly the same kind of thought process that is going on. And I just always found it so interesting how Europeans view the colonies as a space of fear, because it is that space where people are coming together and mixing."

"I don’t think many people realize what it’s like to be a maid, what it’s like to be poor, and to literally have zero opportunities in life. My great-grandmother was always depending on family taking her in. When she was depressed, she referred to herself as an “arrimada,” which is hard to translate but it’s almost like saying a parasite. She thought she was nothing, a parasite…"

"Noemí’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once."

"Lesbian relationships are the fantasy, the ideal — I would say that I think lesbians and queer women perpetrate that that idea. And I think it can be really harmful, because it doesn't permit space for a multitude of experiences, some of which can be bad — not because the relationship is a lesbian relationship, but because somebody in the relationship is not well."

"People like domestic violence narratives to be very clear cut, and I talk about in the book how on some level I really wished, I wish she had just punched me in the face, and I had this black eye, and I could be like, "Hey, she punched me. I had a black eye. You recognize that, right?" But it was a lot more subtle than that…"

"There’s something so dark and weird about what a cliché it is…And it makes art harder because it’s like how do I turn this thing that operates on cliché — its life blood is the cliché — and create something interesting from this incredibly dead thing? If you say it’s as hot as an oven, your brain skips over the phrase, it’s so worn. And that’s what makes cliché so dangerous. If you say it enough, you lose your ability to engage with it in any kind of critical capacity."

"Sometimes stories just need something to hold on to, and form is a way of doing that. Sometimes you’re looking at a story and you’re like, What comes next? But if I say I have to add an item to the list, another lover or an episode of SVU…it’s easier."

"... I find writing nonfiction difficult; it feels like pulling teeth. It’s technically and logistically challenging and emotionally draining, and the whole time you have one hand behind your back. I admire folks who write good nonfiction so much, because I’ve seen firsthand how hard it is to make it work and work well."

"I usually start from a concept, an idea, a form, a question, or a (sub)genre. Never a character or a setting. And I don’t write into nothing; I always have somewhere I’m directing my thoughts."

"I kept on ignoring him. The dead are only ghosts, after all."

"In short, I was behaving well...but at another level I was just Going Through The Motions. One of the things about being a grown-up is learning how to do that, learning how to act right even when you feel wrong."

"Ghosts don’t do things to you. Ghosts make you do unspeakable things to yourself."

"Here in the South, class-action lawyers are what we have instead of unions. Legally speaking, we prefer shoot-outs to sit-ins."

"I thought about how the sound of burning and the sound of running water are almost the same."

"The present is a rope stretched over the past. The secret to walking it is, you never look down. Not for anyone, not even family. The secret is to pretend you can’t hear the voices of the people who have fallen down there in the dark."

"Houston is basically a concrete saucepan full of swamp water. The sun heats it up to a slow boil in May and keeps it simmering through to the end of October."

"There’s a fine line between Houston and farce."

"There are so many different ways lives work out, so many stories, and every one of them is precious: full of joy and heartbreak, and a fair amount of situation comedy. Every life is a movie that starts in color. They just all end in black and white."

"Humayun's works are the most profound and most fruitful that literature has experienced since the time of Tagore and Nazrul."

"A skilled photographer equipped with a camera with a very powerful lens who captures mainly photographs of ordinary birthday parties."

"Uncle Jamil: (After reciting the Quran at the end of the prayer, he says to Moti) Listen Moti, Allah created the world and humans because of His love. Now tell me, what do you understand by love? Moti: Love is a matter of shame and embarrassment between husband and wife, but it is necessary. Uncle Jamil: (Struck with bloodshot eyes and shocked) Moti, get out of my sight right now... Who is there, anyone, bring a bucket of water, pour water on my head..."

"As the days go by, Bangabandhu is getting more and more annoyed with the military. The military is a monster. Just as the Pakistani military is a monster, so is the Bangladeshi military. If Saint Martin Island becomes independent for any reason, if they have a military, they will also be monsters. Bangabandhu has made a defense agreement with India for twenty-five years. There is no need for the military anymore. The power of the military must be gradually reduced. It must be done in such a way that they cannot even understand. One morning, they will wake up and see that there is no soil under their boots. There is quicksand under their boots. They will slowly sink into quicksand. This is the only way to make a monster human. Bangabandhu stood up with his pipe in hand. Now it was his turn to see off the visitors one by one. The list of those he met that day and the measures he took is given below- 1. Relatives of the devoted Awami Leaguer Mozammel: Mozammel has been captured by Major Nasser. Place Tongi. As soon as Bangabandhu entered the house, Mozammel's father and the two Bangabandhu fell at his feet. The Tongi Awami League president also tried to catch him but failed. He tried to catch Mozammel's relatives. Finding his feet, Bangabandhu said, "Tell me what happened?" The Tongi Awami League president said, "Our Mozammel is involved in a false case. Major Naser caught him. Naser said, "If you give me three hundred thousand taka, I will release him." What is the false case? Mozammel's father cried and said, "A murder case has been filed." The Tongi Awami League president said, "When this Major Awami League hears this, he lights up like a star. He has publicly declared that he will not hold any Awami League against Tongi." Bangabandhu! I myself am now restless with fear. I do not live in Tongi. I have moved to Dhaka. (Crying) Bangabandhu said, "Don't cry. Nothing worth crying about has happened. I am still alive. I am not dead. I am taking action." He ordered Mozammel to be released immediately. An urgent order was given to remove Major Naser from Tongi. The main incident (Source: Bangladesh Legacy of Blood, Anthony Mascarenhaas) A newlywed couple was traveling in a car. The brutal terrorist Mozammel, along with his gang, intercepted the car. He killed the driver of the car and the husband of the newlywed girl. They all raped the girl. The girl's bloody dead body was found under the Tongi bridge three days later. After Mozammel was caught by Major Naser, Mozammel said, "Don't make trouble and let me go. I will give you three hundred thousand taka. Don't take the matter to the government level. I will be released on the orders of Bangabandhu himself. You will be in danger. I don't want to involve Bangabandhu in a trivial matter." Major Naser said, "Is this a trivial matter?" Mozammel did not answer. He looked at him with bored eyes. Major Naser said, "I will definitely arrange for you to be hanged." Put your three lakh taka in your anus. -Mozammel said, let's see. -Mozammel invited Major Naser to eat cooked kathal at his house after being released."