"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.

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.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

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

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.