The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness

The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.

But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.

Having a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.