Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

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.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.

I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.

If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing.