Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

Screw every known human culture.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.

No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.