All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

The bomb lives only as it is falling.

Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly- endemic to the system.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.