When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.

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.

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.