Elizabeth Moon
Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.
It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.
Having a mother who had been an aeronautical engineer convinced me that more things should be open to women.
Now my mother, interestingly enough, was not a feminist in her own mind.
When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.
I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.
One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.
I love biomedical science, I love astronomy, and you can't really do much with those in a fantasy setting.
I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.
When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
I can become very emotional about math, although I'm not that good at it.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.
My first degree came years before my second. I had wanted to be a physicist, but I flunked calculus.
So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.
I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.
I used to not back down from a challenge.
I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother?
I've taught Sunday school, I've sung in the choir, I directed a choir.
I like the Beatles, of course, but that's when I grew up.
No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.
When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.
Normal' is a dryer setting.Collection: Autism
There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias.Collection: Ignorance
Everything in my life that I value has been gained at the cost of not saying what I really think and saying what they want me to say.Collection: Thinking
No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.Collection: Trying
It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong.Collection: Different
Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.Collection: People
I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.Collection: Life
People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day - even hour to hour.Collection: People
Having to struggle gave me the chance to demonstrate strength of character.Collection: Struggle
One thing nobody can do better than you is be you.Collection: Be You
Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that.Collection: Eye
Even if a tamed wolf makes a good sheepdog, he will never understand how the sheep feel....You are most fortunate. For having been, as you thought, a coward, and helpless to fight - you know what that is like. You know what bitterness that feeling breeds - you know in your own heart what kind of evil it brings. And so you are most fit to fight it where it occurs.Collection: Heart
This individual does not know where initiative ends and rocket-propelled idiocy begins.Collection: Doe
A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.Collection: Thinking
What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.Collection: Jobs
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.Collection: Character
I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance... Maybe my questions matter.Collection: Ignorance
Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.Collection: Past
To the gods belong power, and to us the work of our hands.Collection: Hands
Motivation is the power behind plot.Collection: Motivation
Empress of the Universe would be way too much work. I'd have to wear fancy clothes, probably including lady shoes with pointed toes, and could no longer slouch into the study in PJs and slippers. Someone would (avert!) straighten my desk. Someone would reorganize my yarn stash...in fact, they'd assign someone else to knit my socks, thus depriving me of an excuse to rest my brain while pretending to accomplish something useful.Collection: Yarn
I revear all the gods but those that delight in cruelty. If Ra's light is kindly in your eyes than may his light shine on us all.Collection: Hope
Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the space wasnt big enough. They told me to put 'brown'. I put 'brown', but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look atr other people's eyes.Collection: Writing