Quotes from Adam Roberts

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.

I never liked the news; it pretends to be all different, every day, when in fact it is all the same.

Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.

And after night comes day, or more night, depending on the particular time-frame you choose to apply to your perspective.

A fine story', said Asterinov .... 'Six months in prison, that tale,' said Sergei. 'Was it the witch?', I asked 'I never know where the Party stands on issues of the supernatural...' ..... 'It was, - understand, I do not know for sure, I heard this at second or third hand - it was the walk through the forest. Apparently I was just too convincing in the representation of a poor man's yearning for money...'

This is what happened. Pay attention.

and I said it is the nature of love to be infinite and in such an ocean any fear and jealousy is washed away

Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it.' He

Reality, in truth is … what is the word? Reality is ironic .

A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fianc'e; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying.

The White Cliffs of Dover had been sculpted all along their length into the gigantic visages of famous Brits – another attempt at injecting rebrand vibrancy into the declining real-world economy.

That's a nice sense of immunity from prosecution you got there," Alma told them. "Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Marriage is at its best when the love that binds you is simply the idiom in which the two of you move; not something that keeps interrupting your day to day with melodramatic professions of undying love and an endless parade of gifts and boasts and promises.

And now it's afterwards. The worse of it is: it will always be afterwards now.

I know you're upset, of course you're upset," said Pu Sto's simulacrum. "You're grieving. Of course you are. I know how much you loved her." "Love her," Alma corrected, holding up one finger. "A little thing like dying doesn't cast that mighty verb into the past tense, you know.

O dark dark dark. It was always dark and it would always be dark and it always had been dark - or there would have been no need for the brightness of Marguerite's company.

To say a word once is communicative, to say it twice is emphatic, but to say it twenty times turns it into a trippy floating nothing.

Then, finally disengaging from the kiss, Jac stuffed the severed item into Mo's open mouth, crammed it hard in.

science fiction begins not with Gernsback, Wells, Verne or Shelley, but rather with the Protestant Reformation, when science as we now understand the term began to separate itself from magic as the idiom for fantastic voyages, utopias, future speculation and technological extrapolation.

It is surprising how much disruption the structure of normal life can absorb and still keep functioning. But then again, considered mathematically, society has never been an assemblage of things so much as an assemblage of variables.

Talk is what we have, what makes us distinctive. Talk to us is what webs are to a spider, or speed to a gazelle.' 'Talk is how we bring what's inside our minds into the outside world,' Albie said. 'Animals have feelings and thoughts. Animals have always had feelings and thoughts – it's just that only now have they been able to bring them out.

I don't recall all twelve points of the Great Animal Charter, but I know that the right to vote, to work, the right to welfare benefits and the creation of a set number of specifically animal MPs and MEPs was part of it. It was never going to happen, of course. I don't suppose the animals believed it would pass; their intention was to provoke dissension amongst humanity.

I'll have to come over,' she told Zurndorfer. 'What – in person?' 'Yes.' Zurndorfer's simface goggled at her. 'I'm sorry to be dense, but, you mean physically shift yourself from over there to … you know. Here?' 'Yes.' 'Well, I say, well of course. I mean. If you think that's necessary. Is that necessary?

Walks all ass straw.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.