Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

Sound science must be our guide in choosing which problems to tackle and how to approach them.

When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

The 'science' for which the United States is respected has nothing to do with the unscientific and baseless theory of evolution.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.