For honest insight into who you are, don't ask yourself what your priorities are for next week. Ask what your priorities were last week.

A brilliant mind was never as clever as three average minds sniffing after something of interest.

I would like to say that I have software that allows me to model worlds to a high degree of scientific plausibility. I'd also like to be six foot two and fifteen years into my reign as Emperor of Europa. The simple truth is that past the character's name and a long history of making my own body cover distances, I did very little in the way of targeted research.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

A community is a small group working together. Community scales by adding groups, and building connections between them, not enlarging them.

I don't believe people let things slide away. It's the nature of the universe that everything dissolves into oblivion and by every route possible, but human beings invest a lot of cleverness trying to cling to past events, real or imagined. And because we can't succeed, we get angry and frustrated and feel guilty. Except the Buddhists.

Science fiction is really a rather tiny business compared with its giant cousin, which is fantasy.