I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.
I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
[I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation], and eventually you find yourself in the room with the Radiant Being around whom all this is revolving. It's very bizarre, and it's quasi-religious, or possibly genuinely religious. Spooky. It's a spooky and interesting thing.
I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism.
It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat.
I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.
To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.
I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America.
The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed.
I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff.
I'm very primitive in terms of economics. The kind of new business in which stock gets more valuable because the company grows, but there must be limits to growth. But if publishing is expanding to fill that retail space, it seems like there may be a necessary and unpleasant correction waiting down the road. How many books to people WANT?
The Simpson's in Piccadilly has been turned into the largest bookstore in all of Europe! How can they fill it? All of these purpose-built Borders and Chapters and every new mall that goes up has a giant chain bookstore with a purpose-built author reading space, whoah, what's gong on there.
I've been through the whole western world, and it seems to me that there's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than food! There's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than there's been in the entire history of humanity! It's grotesque!
If I were in severely straitened socio-economic circumstances and had to move to the U.S., I'd probably opt for Athens, GA, or Lawrence, KS. As boho guys usually do, live cheap in the Left Bank of Kansas.
It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.
I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.
There's violence in my culture [from America's South].
I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.
I don't think about the real future very much.
You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.
I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.
