You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

On this day I want to tell you about, which will be about a thousand years from now, there were a boy, a girl and a love story.

My old English buddy, John Rackham, wrote and told me what made science fiction different from all other kinds of literature - science fiction is written according to the science fiction method.

I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette.

I'm pretty catholic about what constitutes science fiction.

The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring.

What were we doing here? Traveling hundreds or thousands of light-years, to break our hearts?