Science Fiction Isn’t Just Thinking About The

Historically, I Guess That's How Science Fiction Works: You Start By Using Aliens To Think The Unthinkable — And Then, Eventually, Another Writer, Having Grown A Little More Comfortable With The Earlier Notion, Brings It Into The Human.

The Poems ... Are Moments When I Had The Intensity To See, And The Energy To Build, Some Careful Analog That Completed The Seeing. ... All I Have Been Left Is The Exhausting Habit Of Trying To Tack Up The Slack In My Life With Words.

Fiction -- At Least For Me -- Requires Long, Relatively Uninterrupted Time Stretches In Which To Bring It To Fruition. I've Never Been A Two-hour-in-the-morning Writer, Who Could Put In Another Six Hours On Sunday Afternoon. For Me, A Novel Requires Weeks Of Living In A Largely Mental And Wholly Internal Landscape. Everything Else Has To Be Relegated To The Odd Hour Here, The Bit Of Time There. Sadly, However, Uninterrupted Time Blocks Are Not What Life Doles Out Today To Any Of Us With Regularity.

The Reason For Privacy Is Not So That People Will Not Know You Go To The Bathroom. It's To Allow Certain Things To Go On That You Don't Want Other People To Know About, When All Is Said And Done. But The Things I Don't Want Other People To Know About Are Not My Sex Life.

But I Realized Something. About Art. And Psychiatry. They're Both Self-perpetuating Systems. Like Religion. All Three Of Them Promise You A Sense Of Inner Worth And Meaning, And Spend A Lot Of Time Telling You About The Suffering You Have To Go Through To Achieve It.