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.

Sci-fi is very much an American genre. Space and the exploration of space is something so closely associated with America.

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 into politics. I'm into survival.

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.

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