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

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.

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.

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

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.