I think the challenge for humans remains the same as it has always been: to learn the skills of kindness, compassion, and love. Without these sacred skills, all technology can do is grow the shadows in our lives.

I think the future is intrinsically linked with our universal human problems. In fact, it's these very problems, and how we deal with them, which will determine our future.

In the story ["The Pyramid and the Ass"] there's this war against the so-called Buddhist Terrorists. As we find out, they're not really terrorists at all, just good folks trying to liberate people from technology and fight against an American government/corporation trying to coopt our souls. The inherent racism and Buddhist-phobia in the story plays into the present demonizing of Islam - and of our loss of knowledge about the great, spiritual history of the Sufis, for example, or the cultural heritage from the middle east.

However, in my fiction, I want to give an even further warning of where we're heading. And so, in "Heartland," you have people selling off their topsoil, and an underwater oil spill that has lasted over three-hundred days.

I love the Russian absurdists - [Nikolai] Gogol,[Daniil] Kharms, and [Vladimir] Bulgakov. Even within the Russian experimentalists, there's a lineage of traditional narrative, conflict, and character development, which I find vital to my storytelling.

Parents are already telling their kids about falling in love online - there's nothing "frightening" or "dystopian" about this. So, the critique doesn't work, because we already consider our dystopic state of affairs normal.

When I wrote the story ["The Cartographers"], I'd just gone through a breakup with a woman I'd loved dearly. Without this other person in my life, the memories we'd shared often felt like phantoms. Who was this person I once loved? Did she still really exist? The answer, on a metaphysical level, was that this person didn't still exist. She'd gone on to become a different person, an individual with new hopes and dreams which no longer involved me.