Every Luke Skywalker needs his Darth Vader.

Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk – a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts – in its own image.

The clock indicates the moment-but what does eternity indicate?

Its a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Immensely clever and libidinously hilarious.The most astonishing thing about Love in a Dead Language is its ingenious construction. Insofar as any printed volume can lay claim to being a multimedia work, this book earns that distinction.

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

The constituents of tragedy may be universally acknowledged, easily invoked and deeply felt, but the elements of comedy are, I think, more widely variable from person to person.

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.

The juggernaut that is steampunk, like Dr. Loveless's giant mechanical spider in the 1999 film version of 'The Wild, Wild West,' seems capable of crushing all naysayers.