We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

I see music as an aid. It overcomes my internal editor, especially when the music evokes the character or the mood I'm trying to build.

The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.

I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

I don't believe that climate-change fiction will change the mind of a denier because most of the deniers I've met are basically in a cult situation. It's a faith issue. It's not a rational issue. There's no fact that's going to change their mind. They simply believe in the cult of climate-change denial and it somehow feeds into the rest of the mythos of their own life story.