In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism's problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that's formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind.

When I started reading George R.R. Martin's 'A Song of Ice and Fire' novels, it was the late 1990s and obsessing over fantasy novels was (if painful memory serves) a super-nerdy thing to do.

I had just been sort of raised and formed in a general Christian context, and it seemed to my teenage self that I found the argument for Catholicism very compelling. To the extent that there was a personal driving force, it was more on the intellectual side of things than the mystical or deeply personal. When I converted, I thought it was true.

America's gravest moral evil, chattel slavery, was defeated by an authoritarian president in a religious civil war, not by proceduralism or constitutional debate.

Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college's incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.

Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.

I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

When it comes to explaining the phenomenon of right-wing populism, liberals are likely to argue both that the populist era has exposed a darkness always present at the heart of conservative politics and that a toxic, post-truth new-media ecosystem has greased the skids for President Trump, Brexit and the rest.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

When we have machines that are as intelligent - and then twice as intelligent - as we are, there is no reason why that relationship cannot be synergistic rather than antagonistic.

Sci-fi is just as much about social science as technology.

A lot of people forget that the origin of science fiction in the U.S. was in the post-First World War period when there was a real interest to get people into technical careers.

All the things that made us basically nasty, rapacious, competitive as a species are not necessarily hard-coded into whatever passes for the DNA of artificial intelligence.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

I've had many of my books optioned.

I am very pro-science.

In the best atheist sense of the word, I feel blessed.

I'm much more interested in writing about the things that engage and enrage me as an adult rather than in wallowing in childhood sorrows.

Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.

Social progress is a big thing for me. Although science fiction is traditionally concerned with the hard sciences, which is chemistry, physics, and, some might argue, biology, my father was and still is a social scientist at the University of Toronto.

My mother is an American.

In addition to psychopaths, 'Quantum Night' is also a novel about literally thoughtless people, without inner voices, thoughts in their heads.