Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.

What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet.

I'd like to be proven wrong on the difficulty of handling the medical side-effects of long term exposure to deep space (both microgravity induced illnesses and radiation damage).

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?

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?

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.