Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.

It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.