Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.

It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.

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.

When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

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