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.
I like to do things that are surprising and different.
I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.
Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.
The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.
I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.
Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.
It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.
Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
