I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

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.