American writer of science fiction, b.1948 Popularity:
“Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?”
“Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actually was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data.”
“A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”
“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written. '1984' is really about 1948. It can't really be understood outside the historical context of 1948.”
“I've had a growing frustration, particularly when I would go out and do book tours and interviews. I got frustrated with people asking me, "How do you know what the future is going to be like?" And I'd always say, "I don't."”
