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“ A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. ”

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“ Why celebrate pretense and bold gestures in pop music, but get weirdly skeptical of them in the indie world? It's as if we've reached the point where one long-running indie value-- the idea that the performers are a lot like the audience-- has started eating up a much more interesting one: that indie can be a realm that embraces oddity and strangeness. ”

“ First I took a stab at designing a straight alt-hist novel. (Elevator pitch: "I'm going to cross the streams of The IPCRESS File and Heart of Darkness in a universe where the first world war ended in 1919 with allied tanks sitting in the wreckage of Berlin, and the decaying British empire went on to invent fascism in the 1940s. It's 1962, and two OSS agents are injected into British-dominated Europe to trace the underground railroad that is funneling abducted/brainwashed American scientists east. Our two spooks, "Wild" Bill Burroughs and his swivel-eyed Californian sidekick Philip K., follow the trail — by way of a sleazy S&M nightclub in Hamburg presided over by ageing queen Adi and his boyfriend Rudi Hess — to Ceylon, where in the guts of a hollowed-out mountain they confront the jackbooted, monocle-wearing Air Commodore Arthur Clarke and his program to build an atom-bomb powered space dreadnought.")

My agent shot it down as "too weird". With 20/20 hindsight, I think she may have had a point.

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“ It seems to me that the natural [economic] counterpoint to fantasy is actually horror. Compare The Lord of the Rings, where the "free peoples" are the social classes of an ideal feudal society (clergy, aristocracy, peasants, and artisans) being threatened by the industrialists of Mordor and Isengard (wouldn't a Marxist treatment have Sauron's victory followed by a rebellion of the orcs and their establishment of a workers' state?) with Dracula, where the wicked feudal lord draining the very blood of the peasantry is opposed by a kind of joint stock company whose shareholders are a cross section of the international bourgeoisie. ”

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