It was the day my grandmother exploded.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.