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

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool 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.

The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed.