Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before.

I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.