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Maybe it’s my age, but I’m not really feeling it when it comes to the radicalism vibe these days. But perhaps that’s to be expected. You supposedly get more conservative as you get older anyway. Plus, revolution is far less attractive when you’ve got a mortgage and your kids’ university education to pay for. Interest rates don’t react well to the overthrow of the state. I’ve got no skin in the game here, no reason to don a petard. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Loo

I think the old Chinese proverb goes something like: “It’s a curse to live in interesting times” (I’ll look up the actual quote later and get back to you. I promise I fact-check everything), but as a student back in the mid-noughties, I felt cursed not to be living in interesting times. Those were the days when the worst people said about politicians was they all looked and sounded like clones of a management seminar coach on powerful antidepressants. It was a time when the

We all have secrets. We all lie. The scale of the lies we tell varies, of course. There are degrees of lying, just as there are degrees of sunshine or murder. Most people, we assume, aren’t sociopaths or compulsive liars, but most of us at one time or another tells the occasional untruth. Fiction writing is a kind of lying, but it’s also a way of telling the truth. I suppose you can say it’s a way of disguising your own secrets in a story. I’m pretty certain I’m not the first

We need to talk about AI Something’s bugging us right now—tech pun very much intended (though technically it’s a double entendre, not a pun). I haven’t met a single person in the last few years who hasn’t expressed anxiety about the rise of AI. What will it mean for us? How many jobs will be wiped out? What will we turn into when our purpose is taken away from us? Can robots pay tax? Will they get pissed if they do? Is that what caused the machines to rise up in the Terminato

It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when inspiration for the series struck. I don’t think that ever happens with me—being ‘struck’ with inspiration, I mean. It’s kind of like beard growth: it creeps across my face until I look in the mirror and think, ‘Christ, when did I last shave?’ I found the idea of a device or centralised data system that you can just plug into your head, downloading thoughts and ideas intriguing. Intriguing and terrifying. Terrifying for reasons I thi

People often assume that if you’ve even attempted to write a novel, you’re either supremely self-confident—code for [insert anti-social personality disorder type here]—or blessed with a God-given talent that makes words flow like nectar from your fingers onto the screen. Neither assumption is true—in my case anyway. For me, writing (or, better still, the urge to write) comes to me in the same way as the urge to sneeze. I don’t think about it. It’s just a reflex. A twitch. Som