People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.
From Frederik Pohl
Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.
If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.
I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.
I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.
It's clear that science and science fiction have overlapping populations.
Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple of years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).
A lot of the cosmologists and astrophysicists clearly had been reading science fiction.
The head of Fermilab was reading Astonishing Stories when he was ten.
A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.
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