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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.