Some of my ideas were shot down by Lucasfilm because they stepped on territory that has been reserved for the movies. I didn't have a problem with that.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

Genre labels are useful only insofar as they help you find an audience.

I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.

I was pretty much grown-up by the time I attended school in Britain - or as grown-up as I'll ever get.

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.

The Internet offers an interesting combination of advertising and community - by participating in the community you can become an advertisement for yourself.