What I love about the sci-fi community is that it’s the most nonjudgmental, inclusive, diverse environment in the country. There’s no group of people that is more diverse and inclusive.

Whenever I get an audition to do something that is sci-fi-related, it makes me really happy because I realize that I can continue doing the work that I’m doing and continue meeting people all over the world. It does baffle my management team sometimes, though!

As a boy, my favorite show was ‘Superman’ and my favorite movie was ‘Star Wars’ – along with other science fiction shows and movies. And I always wanted to fly.

I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: ‘There is change. Look, today’s fantastic story is tomorrow’s fact.

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called ‘Les Mains d’Orlac.’ Call it a bastard offspring of ‘Frankenstein;’ its plot revolved around the old theme of Science Giving Us Stuff We Shouldn’t Have – in this particular case, restoring severed body parts.

If you ordered up a whore here, you’d probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?” His eyes lit up for a moment. “I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a whore and a Hershey bar?

I don’t think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It’s instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That’s why I write science fiction — even though the term ‘science fiction’ excites disdain in certain persons.

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

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

I don’t recall any interest in science in particular. It came later in college.

That’s what we want to do here at Johnson Space Center. I think what we have always brought to NASA and brought to the country is trying to push the boundaries, trying to go to the next level.

Professor Tyndall once said the finest inspiration he ever received was from an old man who could scarcely read. This man acted as his servant. Each morning the old man would knock on the door of the scientist and call, “Arise, Sir: it is near seven o’clock and you have great work to do today

Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain.

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

When you’re thirsty and it seems that you could drink the entire ocean, that’s faith; when you start to drink and finish only a glass or two, that’s science.

In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not.

I love science fiction, but I have a hard time feeling for characters in a galaxy far away. Choosing movies is the one thing in my life where there’s no compromising.