I had been reading a lot about pioneers in Australia and the colonization of Australia, and pioneers in Virginia and the early settlers in the United States, and I was fascinated by those communities and how they grew, how their politics developed, and the actual suffering of those people and the tribulations they went through.

Sometimes maybe it's good to have someone doing a sci-fi show who's not actually necessarily from that background. It also means that sometimes I fall into the most elementary of traps.

The best content is the means, not the end.

I'm not from a particularly sci-fi background. I'm not anti sci-fi at all, but I've never been known as a sci-fi writer and, suddenly, I was creating a flagship BBC sci-fi show, which is terrifying sometimes.

I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.

I wrote about the life of a housing officer in Britain, in a pretty rough area of London. Maybe it was because I'm a big-mouth and an exhibitionist, and I'm slightly egotistical. All those things have to come together for a writer.

Just because there's a trillion places to put an idea doesn't mean you don't need an idea in the first place