Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.