--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.

In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.