Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.

Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don't instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that's happening beneath the surface.

If you're a writer, you don't serve genres. Genres serve you. Like, if you're writing a science fiction story set on a spaceship, you don't have to have someone thrown out an airlock.

On the one hand, technology is more mysterious. On the other hand, we're more aware of its limitations. Every time I watch Star Trek, I'm highly aware of magical everything is: the holodeck, the warp drive. It's possible that with wormholes we might eventually be able to do something like that. But the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving.

Earlier, if you had a piece of technology, anyone could theoretically take it apart and put it back together again, and understand how it works. Some people would do that with the technology that they owned. It's not as easy to do that today. Most users wouldn't even think to do anything like that.

There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars.

Live every day as if you've come back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent everything from breaking.