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

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

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).

The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!