Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't do flash fiction.
Biggest influence: my mother.
Starships are all work and no fun.
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
We are, after all, homo economicus.
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!
I do not click on random youtube videos.
Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.
Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
I have a low taste for urban fantasy and paranormal romance.
Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.
I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).
I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.
It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.
I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.
More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.
Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.
If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.
Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.
In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.
The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".
Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.
Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?
Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.
I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.
Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.
I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.
My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.
Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.
The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the "piracy" problem is massively over-rated.
If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.