I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.