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

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.

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066.

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

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.

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.

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