I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous.