It doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists.
If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it’s not. And it’s not.
A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response.
The future is not google-able.
Cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the telephone.
The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.
I don’t always like writing, but I very much like having written.
Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.
My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me.
This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.
Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.
I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.
Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.
I don’t think about the real future very much.
Some people dote on contemplating disasters.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you’re attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.
I’d always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early Internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn’t realised it was there.
I’m often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I’ve always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.