What does science fiction mean to you?

I'm frustrated with Hollywood and television and the movies because they see science fiction as an excuse for eye candy, for lots of great special effects.

I love seeing the dinosaurs and the space ships and the time machines and whatever they want to create, I love it, but once they get there, they don't start asking, "What does it mean, what's the next step?" It's just an excuse to have the dinosaur chase somebody in a jeep or whatever.

I say, "No, there's more to this!" Science fiction is a unique literature. Science fiction is the first literature that says, "Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different." This really started just in the last hundred years, it started with Verne and Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle a little bit, where you had guys predicting possibilities.

When you get to Wells talking about the time machine, to me that's the breakthrough story, because he's saying the future will be vastly different than the past. In the 20th century we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive.

At the end of that century we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds. We could photograph atoms. We had telescopes that could look to the far end of the universe and our computers could say, "If this trend continues we'll have this much pollution or we'll have this little something or other," and we actually could look into our own future in a way that we'd never been able to do before.

If you were a kid in 1955 you would pick up a copy of Popular Science and it would say, "This is the kind of car you're going to be driving in five years or in 20 years you'll be able to take a jet plane from New York to London in four hours," or something like that. We actually got used to the idea that the future's going to be different.

Star Trek, as a popular phenomenon, brought that idea into the mainstream of human thought. It was no longer science fiction as this fringe thing, now here it's on television, we're saying, "Look, the future's going to be different." To me that's the first step.

The second step is if we have this future that's going to be different, then we also have the responsibility to design our future. If we're going to be able to design our future then we have to ask ourselves what future are we going to design? Who are we? Who do we want to create? How do we want to create it?

Ultimately it comes back to the question of what does it mean to be human. Who are we as human beings? What are we going to give up from the past? We have to give up a lot of stuff, we have to give up superstition, some of the fairy tales that we've wrapped up our faith in. I'm all in favour of faith but if you have true faith you don't need all of the fairy tales.

If we can get rid of superstition then we're going to ask ourselves questions about how we relate to each other as human beings. How do we treat each other? What does it mean to be in love? What does it mean to communicate? Who are we? And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question.

When we look up at the night sky and wonder, "Is there anyone else out there?" we're also asking who we are we in relation to them. When we go into the past, go into the future, when we postulate alternate kinds of human beings we're asking what's the core of humanity. If we could grow gills so we could breathe underwater, would we still be human? Well, our bodies wouldn't be human as we define humanity [now] but would our souls be human? To me science fiction has always been about that question.