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.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.
The first stories I wrote when I was 12 were about Mars and landing on Mars.
And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.
Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.
A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that.
The stories that engaged me as a kid were all science fiction. Later, it turned out that I didn't have the language to talk about what was bothering me in a way that was straightforward.
When I read 'Planet Terror,' it was like nothing I had ever read before remotely, and yet it has so many references.
No opposing quotes found.