“When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed.”
“Humor is rare in science fiction... there's so little of it that it automatically reminds you of other heroes with that acerbic humor when you find it.”
John Scalzi
“In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folk...”
John Scalzi
“The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”
John Scalzi
“(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligen...”
John Scalzi
“Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the ...”
John Scalzi