Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

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).

What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.

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.

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.