All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

It's possible that there is a guiding intelligence in our universe. I don't see a lot of personal evidence for an interventionist-on-an-individual-basis-deity. I have friends who very much do believe in that. But I don't.

Science fiction has never been about the future; it's always been about the present day whether it's Victorian England that Wells was writing about or the post-9/11 era that I'm writing about.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

It is a labor of love, but there is a lot of labor, especially when you're trying to build a big, epic world with lots of details and a kind of physics of magic that makes some sense and actually has some rules to it.

Writing is a journey of discovery because until you start, you never know what will happen, and you can be surprised by what you do - expect the unexpected!

About the time you might start to think that science fiction - the real stuff, not the species of fantasy that goes under the name - is really dead, along comes a story by Cory Doctorow.