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.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

No one grows up. That's one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don't want to be in… and they make the best of it. But don't try to tell me it's some kind of… glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It's not.

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

Would I have been happier? Maybe. But then, happiness was overrated.

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.