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.

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?

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.

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

I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.