Sci fi, if you recall your Latin, is the plural of scum fum, as in scum fum Hollywood. In movies and TV you're allowed to use phoney science, comic book stories and cardboard characters. And I took that to heart as well. Moral fiction - that's what I'm trying to write. Fiction is not a morally neutral act.
Science means knowing, fiction means making it up.
Theoretically we're standing between the poets and the engineers and making it possible for them to speak to each other. It seems to be the central problem of the 20th century, getting the poets and the engineers talking and understanding each other's concepts. It's the genre that believes there will be a future. He likes to mention that it was Heinlein who pointed out that the last item to come fluttering from Pandora's Box was Hope - and that same sense of optimism and humanity permeates the books and stories he writes. The biggest problem I see around me that I have the tools to cope with is rotten morale.