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.

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.

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

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

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