I'll tell you, I've never particularly been a Trek person. I feel about Trek the way one feels about known, vaguely liked, but rather distant members of one's family.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

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.

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.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.