I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’!

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.

'The Devil in the Dark' impressed me because it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today's politicians have yet to learn.

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

If children have interests, then education happens.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?