Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen to or read about.

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.