Edward M. Lerner

It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.

I have to believe SF writers will continue to inspire the public to have faith in - to demand! - a future that is at least as big and bold as the past.

Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future.

What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.

Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. 'The Two Towers,' for example, ought never to be read in isolation.

Anything that can unambiguously represent two values - while resisting, just a wee bit, randomly flipping from the state you want retained into the opposite state - can encode binary data.

The challenge - and much of the fun - of writing in an established future history lies in incorporating new knowledge while remaining true to what has gone before. Expanding and enriching, not contradicting.

One of the bedrock principles of physics is the conservation of energy. In this universe, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect.

I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Happily, researchphilia is not the problem it once was. The Internet makes just-in-time research very practical.