My agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American - I'm sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I'm quite out of touch with what's going on in UK publishing.

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

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?

What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.

The programmers have another saying: 'The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.'

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

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?