The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Now with the international space station generating a bunch of video, and Space X and other companies pursuing private space flight, I think it's on all of our radars much more than it has been since the moonshots. The science of filmmaking is making these visions possible now.

Everything I learn about the world, whether it's the simple arcana of how commercial products are manufactured and designed and how they reach our shelves and where the chips come from and who does the code, to more profound things like whether or not a black hole might be penetrable as a wormhole, whether or not universes might be accessible from here, whether space can be stretched and compressed to enable faster-than-light travel without violating physical law - all of those things have tremendous story potential.

For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

It is true that, with TV, a writer gets a great deal more respect.

I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood.

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.