Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The term 'steampunk' itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like 'Big Bang' in cosmology, the… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Quite often, intent on conveying how things can go wrong for a culture (science fiction) or an individual (horror) or all of… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Originating with such figures as T. H. Huxley, who sought to bring Darwin's ideas to the masses, the popular science genre moved… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component:… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Some acts of worldbuilding in fiction instantiate a milieu that is so culturally odd and exotic, so displaced from the audience's consensus… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The juggernaut that is steampunk, like Dr. Loveless's giant mechanical spider in the 1999 film version of 'The Wild, Wild West,' seems… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views -… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share Image
“Smellin' the beefaloes and leanpigs turnin' on their spits, holding a cold cheer-beer in my hand, watchin' the stars poppin' out one by one… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets,… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
It is truly bracing and instructive to contemplate the End Times - at least at safe remove, in the pages of fiction - especially… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The sentient beast has long been a staple of fantasy fiction and its antecedents in myth and folktale. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition.… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
The emotional tone or affect of the tale should be hot and engaged, not remote and dispassionate. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding. — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
Science offers no brief for the telekinetic powers of Darth Vader and hardly any greater justification for the faster-than-light travel that makes his empire… — Paul Di Filippo Copy Share
