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 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.

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.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

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

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

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today. Some of Britain's biggest landowners are still direct descendants of Norman barons. And given the impact that Britain has had on the world over the past few hundred years, you could perhaps say this was a global issue. History is always with us.