An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.

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 late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

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.)