Consider the true picture. Think of myriads of tiny bubbles, very sparsely scattered, rising through a vast black sea. We rule some of the bubbles. Of the waters we know nothing.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.

How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

The best advice I was ever given was on my twenty-first birthday when my father said, Son, here's a million dollars. Don't lose it.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.