If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.