All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

At present, however, I don’t think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it’s quite abundantly clear that there’s not going to be a final answer and there won’t be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation...

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

At San Jose State I got very interested in the work of Stephen Wolfram, who wrote a pretty famous book called A New Kind of Science.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I’m still absorbing its teachings.

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s...

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that’s say, a million times as smart as a person.

It’s soothing to realize that my mind’s processes are inherently uncontrollable.

We’re presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today’s third revolution, were coming...

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

It’s tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that’s not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it’s going to end.

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.

Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn’t deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.

Lately I’ve been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.

Gnarly processes often display patterns at several scales. We find them fun to watch because they tend to appear as if they’re alive.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off...

I like a book better if I can’t predict what’s going to happen.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

Life is a fractal in Hilbert space

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

People rarely write books that are that far out, so it might be interesting to try to write one, but no one will want to read it.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be computed in parallel particle by particle and region by region.

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it’s done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

If all else fails, there’s always print or web zines.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.