Knowledge is not just power - it is control.
— Nick Harkaway
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
'Tigerman' was born in the front seat of a Hilux SUV on the road north out of Chiang Mai.
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
In a social context, digital technology introduces you to neighbours of the mind - people who are separated by distance, but close to you in thought and interest.
I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.
I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.
Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.
In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.
We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.
Being a parent is weird. It changes people in subtle and unsubtle ways. In my case, it awoke a kind of manic sentinel in my brain. Anything in the house that might be a threat to the kids or to my wife gets terminated - food, sharp edges, poor wiring.
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
When the time comes to work, I work.
We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales.
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.
Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.
Whether you're choosing for yourself or for a character - or for a child - names have baggage of their own.
I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.
We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.
We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.
The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
All my characters are me, in one way or another.
A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.
Revolutions come in two stages: the bit where everything gets smashed and the bit where you have to build it again. The first is great fun; the second is so very hard.
We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.
I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.
It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.
My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
Names aren't just coathooks, they're coats. They're the first thing anyone knows about you.
Sir Terry Pratchett - he was knighted in 2009, and on him it looked earned rather than entitled - wrote about dragons, wizards, turtles, witches, time-travelling monks, and suitcases with legs.
I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.
