The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.

At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.

Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.