Interviewer: Why do you think science fiction is always ahead of the curve, in terms of dealing with things without skin-deep judgments?
Siddig: Yeah. Well, the power of allegory. Abstraction can take the most harrowing, complicated real-life situation and say, “But this is actually just two grapes talking and they’re talking to a weird sunflower. They’ve abstracted the humanity out of it and transplanted it into something else that is much more comfortable. Much easier to cope with and gives the writer enormous freedom. I mean, you can do really dark, full-on stuff and take it so far away, to a spaceship somewhere miles and miles (away) on a funny little planet where the creatures are barely recognizable. That and the fact that they work with massive archetypes that we can’t really work with. Only Batman movies can work with those. The characters in Cairo Time, they’re not massive archetypes. They’re normal people. So yes, (as in Deep Space Nine) you’ve got the strong captain; you’ve got the clever doctor. They all have their adjectives or epithets. THAT’s the power of sci-fi. I love sci-fi, computer games. I love any escapes. Give me them all. I’ll take all of them and, yeah, I think that’s the strength of that genre.