I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.

I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.

I like creating villains.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.