To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

Biggest influence: my mother.

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it.

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one’s god module is overactive at the time.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.