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 agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American - I'm sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I'm quite out of touch with what's going on in UK publishing.

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.'

In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.

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

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

I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.