They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.