“General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.”

—  Marvin Minsky

Last update Jan. 15, 2024. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is ab…" by Marvin Minsky?
Marvin Minsky photo
Marvin Minsky 65
American cognitive scientist 1927–2016

Related quotes

Valentino Braitenberg photo

“This is an exercise in fictional science, or science fiction, if you like that better. Not for amusement: science fiction in the service of science. Or just science, if you agree that fiction is a part of it, always was, and always will be as long as our brains are only miniscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

Source: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984), p. 1

Susan Sontag photo

“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

"The Imagination of Disaster" from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

Iain Banks photo

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer
Flannery O’Connor photo

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer
Todd Strasser photo

“The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.”

Todd Strasser (1950) American author of young-adult and middle grade novels
Kurt Vonnegut photo

“Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Neal Stephenson photo

“The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

A Conversation With Neal Stephenson http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm

Jo Walton photo

“One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

Ray Bradbury photo

“Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Science Fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Philip K. Dick photo

“Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

Related topics