The Principle of Moments

"The other side of that is, what does romance bring to sci fi? One of the difficulties that science fiction has faced historically is that it can feel very clockwork and very cold. It often seems, to people who don’t read a vast span of it – and I forgive people, if this is not what they spend their life doing! – as if it’s all got to be very austere captains in grey chairs on grey starships, looking at grey worlds. But there’s so much more depth and emotion and joy to it than that. Really great science fiction will show you the full span of human emotion, as well as some extraordinary technological or societal development that we’ve not yet seen in our ordinary world. I think if you can overlay that beautiful spectrum of human emotion over the extraordinary development, you make it feel much more realistic by proxy. So I think that’s what romance really brings to it – because what are humans, if not hopeless romantics."