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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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!

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

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.

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

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.