In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.
— Alastair Reynolds
No idea should be discarded completely, but - as one might imagine - it does take a degree of ingenuity to find a new spin on something as hackneyed as the 'Adam and Eve' story. But if you think you've got the chops for it, there's no reason not to try.
I'm a genre writer - I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I'm not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write 'core SF' - it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it's not pretending to be anything other than what it is.
When I was writing 'House Of Suns,' there were a few writers I had in mind as role models, the main being Gene Wolfe.
The one thing that really terrifies me is we're going to get a signal from space that clears it all up: 'OK, this is how the universe works, guys.'
If you do a certain amount of work every day, it will eventually become a novel.
Why would you need to expand beyond the solar system if you already have access to all the information you need, and you've essentially insulated yourself against a planetary apocalypse? Maybe that's enough.
One of the dangers of science fiction, particularly bad science fiction, is that you have these scenes where the characters turn to a blackboard and start explaining how this faster-than-light drive works, or something like that. We never really have those conversations in real life. That's not part of the way we interact as human beings.
Speaking for myself, I really struggle to pinpoint whether I became a scientist because I like science fiction, or did I gravitate to science fiction because I identified strongly with scientists.
I hope that 'House of Suns' functions as an independent novel.
I despair of reality television, but I've never met anyone who watches it. Or people say, 'I watch it, but I hate it.' I've never met anyone who loves it. It's like, it's there, and we have to accept it.
We live in a science fictional world with things like cloning and face transplants, and things seem to be getting stranger and stranger.
I didn't have a huge amount of security when I was a scientist from one contract to another. You're always thinking, 'Am I going to have a job this time next year?'
I don't think the computer will win the Booker, but no-one ever expected a computer to beat a chess grandmaster.
Daleks scared the hell out of me, to the point where I wouldn't go round to another boy's house because he had Dalek wallpaper in his bedroom.
I watched 'Who' with a mixture of affection and exasperation through the eighties, always ready to cheer on the Doctor but seldom feeling that the series was playing to its strengths. Some of the adventures, revisited on DVD, turn out to be better than I remembered - others just as infuriating.
'Doctor Who' is part of my science fictional DNA. You could take it out of me, and I'd probably still have ended up being a writer, but almost certainly not the same one.
Don't keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn't setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.
It's not healthy to obsess over every data point, every review or reader comment. I think the first few times you see someone writing about you, you have this massive emotional response to it. But after a while, it all just fades into the background noise.
I'm just happy to have some American readers - enough that it's a viable proposition for my books to appear there.
I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.
As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.
I would much rather we concentrated on the immediate, still-potent dangers, such as nuclear weapons, runaway climate change, and so on. Sort those out, then worry about Hal 9000.
I used to be a strong believer that we would eventually colonize the solar system the way it's been done in science fiction many, many times: bases on the moon, Mars colonized, move out to the outer planets, then we go to the next solar system and build a colony there. I don't know now - I'm not as convinced that's the way it's going to pan out.
If the Chinese are the first to the asteroids or the first to Mars, good for them, as far as I'm concerned.
I was really impressed by '2312.'
I've been enthralled by deep vistas of space and time ever since watching George Pal's film of 'The Time Machine,' while an early encounter with Arthur C. Clarke's 'The City And The Stars' cemented my love for books with a scope spanning millions of years.
I had an artistic streak and was good at painting and drawing and also very good at English, but I did want to be a scientist. The education system means you have to choose physics or Shakespeare. It can't be both.
Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.
I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.
I couldn't think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.
Above all else, 'Doctor Who' still seems to me to offer near-infinite scope for the writer. It must be the least constraining of televisual properties.
I'm not actually that bothered about the 'science fiction-ness' of 'Doctor Who.'
Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.
Ideas have a certain gestation period that can't be forced.
You can't underestimate the importance of cover art.
In the 'Revelation Space' books, the spaceships are a bit old and rusty, and things go wrong, and they don't work quite how they're meant to. And people asked why I did it this way, and groping around for an explanation, I said that I grew up in Barry, this post-industrial sea town full of rusting infrastructure.
As a kid, I'd buy novels with these magnificent Chris Fosse covers which showed an enormous contraption hovering over a planet, and you'd always think 'Where's that going to come in?' And it never did! It was always slightly disappointing when the contents of a book never lived up to the cover.
I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.
I've always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.
If you're creating a whole universe, even if it's a universe squeezed into a solar system, you have to use a little bit of sleight of hand.
When I was a kid, I was reliably informed that we'd have gone to Mars by 1985, and of course it's 2012, and we're still really no closer to a human expedition to Mars, but that shouldn't detract from the amazing achievements that are being done on a day-to-day basis by robotic envoys.
I had - and continued to have - great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera.
I've always loved far future SF, so it was more or less a given that I would one day want to write in that form.
A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships - though that never put me off.
When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.
The idea of a computer winning the Nobel Prize for physics is not too unlikely, citing a computer as joint recipient. It's obviously not a huge leap to think of something similar happening in fiction.
As a science fiction writer, it's hard to think of a more stirring theme than the origin and ultimate destiny of life in the universe.
I've always been attracted to Pertwee's portrayal of the Doctor as dashing man-of-science, charming, sceptical, and rational.
My early memories of 'Who' are clouded by time and confused by repeats and reissues. I have no direct recollection of the first two Doctors and none at all of the first season of the Pertwee era. By the last two seasons of the Third Doctor, I was properly hooked.
