I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.
From Elizabeth Moon
When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.
My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.
Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.
So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives