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.

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

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

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.