Daniel Suarez Quotes

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it.

A life where bots tell us what to do every second - get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person - is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn't even notice.

I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.

In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.

My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

Anything before you’re thirty-five is new and exciting, and anything after that is proof the world’s going to hell.

When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade. But he looked good. Casual.

At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I dont mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities.

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.

We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system... Lacking a central nervous system much less a brain the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I think technology is spreading, and I think ones experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class - not so much to country.

Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can't feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?

Wealth aggregates and becomes political power. Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it.

I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use Twitter. I don't give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can't be localized.

Silicon Valley isn't usually where aspiring authors go to kick-start a literary reputation. [...] How'd he do it? By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don't need Random House.

Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza iwth roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shard an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It's about who you are with and what you will do next.