The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.