I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

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

Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.

An X-wing fighter flies like an airplane. If you look at the physics, it's actually quite impossible.

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.

Space and spacecraft and zero gravity and so forth are very difficult to render.

I try to keep up, and the scientific perspective is always part of my creative approach.