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What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.

Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that's because we're all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.