I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for.
The paucity of near-future U.S. scifi is about the country becoming pessimistic, not being able to see the future clearly. There's a trend in U.S. scifi towards militarism and far-future stuff.
The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.
Pubs are, disturbingly, where I hatch most of my best idea-sculptures: possibly it's something to do with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or maybe it's just having company to yack at.
One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
Luckily, I'm not a stand-up comedian, so I don't get the fear of standing on stage in front of a dead audience: my humorous pieces have to make it past an editor before they get exposed to the public.
I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.
I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
It turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings. Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come.
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
I am a lazy, cynical, middle-aged guy who has long since come to the conclusion that most historical periods really sucked, for most people, most of the time.
History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!
