No lifetime is long enough for those ... who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

Most of us do know we have no immortality. And when you've found a genius, someone who has already purchased his immortality in musical or literary terms, it's maddening.

There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.

Power: a currency that never went out of style.

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

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer