–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Science fiction, as a genre is fundamentally about ideas. It’s about asking an impossible question, “What if…?” and building a story out of the answer.Romance on the other hand, is fundamentally about relationships. The hypothetical...

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres – the fiction has to be real inside your head.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper...

It’s really not the genre for me, or the venue, it’s the writing.

Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with.

Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement...

Sometimes people say that we’re living in the future, and time’s up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn’t about the future. It’s about change and present-day...

A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.

Most high and happy princess, we must tell you a tale of the Man in the Moon, which if it seem ridiculous for the method, or superfluous for the matter, or for the means incredible,...

Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to...

A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you’ll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other’s work as...

the crescent sun is high, the moon low; life is not for the faint-hearted; so why the fuck should art be?

The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new...

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

Horror, let’s face it, is basically pretty dumb. You’re writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn’t care.

I write across several genres. I’m a slut for words. I can’t keep it in my literary pants.

Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It’s just literally never an option!

Crime writers, I’ve noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven’t been caught yet!

Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy.

I want to make my music a genre that people can immediately identify: something that never existed.

Abolish music prejudices. Form opinions and love music for itself, not its genre, performer(s) or popularity status.

– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw...

I think a great many people would enjoy doing what I did, and that is why they enjoy books and movies (and even TV shows these days) that feature Torture and Dismemberment, etc., etc., etc.

There are… otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that...

My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the...

I’ve found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It’s possible to make a connection with any kind of writing – as long as the writing is good.

All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

What I had to say was, in general, I’m not really a fan of any one genre of any kind of film.

Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher – takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone....

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would...

The problem lies not with genre but with formula, which consists of seeing genre conventions as restrictions rather than mere guidelines, ends in themselves rather than possibilities.

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose...

In the industry, trying out new genres is not always encouraged but what I’ve discovered is that as a writer, a jaunt outside my comfort zone generally brings new skills to the main body of...

In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

The action genre is not always the most synonymous with character development.

A lot of people still maintain genre prejudice. I still meet matrons who tell me kindly that their children enjoyed my books but of course they never read them, and people who make sure I...

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true;...

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be...