Scientist

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

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

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

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

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

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.

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

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

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

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

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.