I've been writing science fiction professionally since my first novel A Hidden Place was published in 1986. My books include Darwinia, Blind Lake, and the Hugo Award-winning Spin. My newest novel is The Affinities (April 2015).
Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned.
Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.
Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.
Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.
By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved. I am the one who wakes up in the morning. Always. Every morning. I don’t die. I just become increasingly unlikely.
The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.
The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. .
