...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.

To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.

My Google-fu is strong.

Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?