Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.