There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.

I had, of course, no model for that sort of woman being married, but I can make that up as I go along.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.