If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

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.

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 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.

I reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, "do I want to be remembered for this?" before I get to the point of spending a year on it.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.