Anyone can be a prophet. You just have to say that what you’re talking about is a reflection of God. Or of the gods. Or of some divine spirit. However you want to put it. Whether those things come tru...
He didn’t exactly have the programmer look to him, if you know what I mean. He’d be the programmer’s boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.
You just know this is going to be bad, Susan said.—but when I went to college, Harry continued, throwing a piece of bread at Susan, if your roommate died, you were usually allowed to skip your finals...
Q’eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of I offer you the bread of life, but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into Let us violate...
Other science fiction shows had science advisers and consultants, Hanson pointed out.It's science fiction, Weinstein said. The second part of that phrase matters too.But you're making it bad science...
My characters were...rebelling against something...My own bad writing. I wouldn't do for my characters what they needed for me to do - be courageous enough in my writing to make them interesting.
I’ve been told my liminal space is like the dark of the grave. But I think of it as the dark from the other end of life entirely. The dark of everything ahead, not everything behind.
Is it a shark made of ice? Hanoen asked. Or a shark that lives in ice?
If there’s one thing that distinguishes the human species, it is a pathological need to stay connected. The fact your people will interrupt sex to answer your communicators is a scandal across the ent...
Something funny, Lord Marce? asked a young woman, standing in front of a desk. She was wearing imperial green. This was clearly the emperox, and equally clearly he’d just blown his entrance. He bowed....
[I]t was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail.
You’re all so busy tending to your own personal tree that you don’t look around to see that the forest is on fire.
You’ll notice that the Intrepid’s inertial dampeners don’t work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and...
Whether you're an extra or the hero, this story is about to end. When it's done, whatever you want to be will be up to you and only you. It will happen away from the eyes of any audience and from the...
What is it like when you lose someone you love? Jane asked. You die, too, I said. And you wait around for your body to catch up.
Wes is Wes, Alastair said. One in every family. I love him, but I think of him as a sarcastic pet.
We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole.
We buy time where we may. You bought yourself time, Oi agreed. I don’t think it’s of very good quality.
This novel took me rather longer than usual to write, for a number of reasons but one big one being simply that 2017 was a raging trash fire of a year, filled with horrible people trying to do horribl...
Stop whining like a fucking child. You could have just said, ‘I need your help.’ All right. I need your help. Stop whining like a fucking child. That’s not better.