What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

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

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

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

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.