The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.

That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

When did it become necessary to explain what's so cool about Japan? Everyone was quite obsessed with it 15 years ago. I suppose it's the only Asian country that developed an imaginary entree to me. That's why I go back.

Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.