 All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. |
| In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings. |
| If all else fails, there's always print or web zines. |
| 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 halt! |
| Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation. |
| A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules. |
| Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens. |
| One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments. |
| 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. |
| The hard fact is that not everyone does get published. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me. |
| I like to do things that are surprising and different. |
| Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile. |
| Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts. |
| Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way. |
| Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons. |
| Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail. |
| 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. |
