Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.

... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.