Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God.

Widespread caffeine use explains a lot about the twentieth century.

Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.

I tend to scare myself.

I don't need to be crazy rich and crazy famous. I would just like to keep going.

Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

One of the signs (you) displayed (said): QUESTION AUTHORITY. Comments or slogans of this nature cannot and will not be condoned.

If you're anti-war it doesn't mean you are 'pro' one side or the other in a conflict.

An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty's sake.

Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.

If Alibaba cannot become a Microsoft or Walmart, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

I say that the power of vision extends through the visual rays to the surface of non-transparent bodies, while the power possessed by these bodies extends to the power of vision.

Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.