To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
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.
Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.
The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distri
In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride.
All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys’ game.
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.
She’s right, Kate’s right, I’m right and you’re wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?
Far more creativity, today, goes into marketing of products than into the products themselves
Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.
She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.
The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.
You’re from the future, Mr Netherton?””Not exactly,” he said. “I’m in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn’t your future. Here.
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.
I’ve never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don’t watch them I watch how people behave around them. That’s becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
It’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.