I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.

The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".

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