A lot of screenwriters have a drawer of unsold scripts that they cut their teeth on. I don't have one. Everything I've written, after my first spec, I wrote on assignment. Everything I've written was work.

I think my first love is film. There's something about the span of it and the completion of the experience. You sit down for two hours, in the dark, and you go somewhere else, and then you come back, having completed a journey.

The world may hold startling developments and shocking unknowns.

You need a human story to intersect those points of interest with real stakes on the line, and then things start to be fun, where you can see the ramifications, you see the impact on people's lives of big changes - like taking a man of science, like a surgeon, and robbing him of his understanding of the universe and forcing him into a newer and wider understanding.

I never stopped loving the deeper sciences, and I read as deeply into lay science as I can.

Real vectoring in space, real orbital mechanics, is very counterintuitive, very strange, and very hard to render. It's expensive, and there's a learning curve. Some of it is about raising audience literacy to the point where they understand that.

Making the right choices on the worlds we explore is going to be our biggest challenge.