Gabe Newell

One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.

If I buy a game on Steam and I'm running it on Windows, I can go to one of the Steam machines and already have the game. So you benefit as a developer; you benefit as a consumer in having the PC experience extended in the living room.

When you get up into the crown of a redwood tree, you lose sight of the ground entirely. You also lose sight of the sky. And you're in a lost world. You're in an undiscovered, unexplored ecosystem, somewhere between Heaven and Earth, filled with forms of life, not all of which have been given names by scientists yet.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.