Paul Di Filippo Quotes

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Paul Di Filippo

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 29, 1954

It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Paul Di Filippo

Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader.

Paul Di Filippo

Only a minority of science fiction dystopias attempt to plumb the real existential roots of oppression, the flaws in humanity's nature that undermine our best attempts at organizing ourselves into social units.

Paul Di Filippo

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Paul Di Filippo

Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music, cosplay, and maker culture - that we tend to imagine its superficial aspects are all that define it.

Paul Di Filippo

Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contemporary hands these devices represented state-of-the-art speculation.

Paul Di Filippo

The term 'steampunk' itself, now a badge of honor, began as a putdown, a joke. But like 'Big Bang' in cosmology, the diss became the standard.

Paul Di Filippo

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.

Paul Di Filippo

The advent of AIDS circa 1980 has really forced medicine and biology to take enormous steps just for sheer survival. The same way war propels hard technology, AIDS has created wartime conditions in the field of biology that will have all sorts of spin-offs.

Paul Di Filippo

I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment.

Paul Di Filippo

You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that's what's going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you.

Paul Di Filippo