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.

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

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 stronger a brand’s point of view, the greater its voltage.

I'm not into politics. I'm into survival.

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'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.