Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

The History Of The Universe In Three Words CHAPTER ONE Bang! CHAPTER TWO sssss CHAPTER THREE crunch. THE END

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.