[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.

I have a fear of nuclear annihilation. I'm a child of the cold war: I didn't live more than 10 miles from a major WarPac nuclear target until the Berlin Wall came down and the CW ended. Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist - there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.

There's a long-standing (50 year old) flame war within the field over whether it's "sci-fi" or "SF".SF has traditionally been looked down on by the literary establishment because, to be honest, much early SF was execrably badly written - but these days the significance of the pigeon hole is fading; we have serious mainstream authors writing stuff that is I-can't-believe-it's-not-SF, and SF authors breaking into the mainstream. If you view them as tags that point to shelves in bricks-and-mortar bookshops, how long are these genre categories going to survive in the age of the internet?