''As for the way the world has changed the Net, all the old, boring institutions of finance, government, industry and so on have moved into the playground, and libertarians and anarchists are once again revealed to be a vanishingly tiny minority of the population. The Net has become more representative of where society is at. Unfortunately, if I could imagine what the most profitable uses of it were, I wouldn't be sitting here – I'd be out trying to find a way of getting rich on it before the crash. (There may be a financial crash coming, but the Net is here to stay.)"

I started writing The Star Fraction, in '87 or '88. It came along very slowly, because I had absolutely no idea what the plot was, or whatever. I just had the initial situation: a woman scientist finding her laboratory had been broken into. As she's surveying the damage, this well-armed, hunky guy turns up and offers to help. That's basically how it started. I had no idea who had broken into the lab or what had been going on or anything.

''Somebody described Ellen May Ngwethu, from The Cassini Division, who has no compunction in wiping out whole non-human races, as 'the most evil protagonist in the universe.' I certainly don't think she's evil from a human point of view, and I don't believe there's an extra human point of view that matters to us. Ellen's belief is mine, that fundamentally human beings are their own moral arbiters, our little moral center. So there is no 'good' external to the question of what is good for us. But without some form of religious belief, there's literally nothing else to go on, to drive us. I don't think morality has any meaning whatsoever once it moves beyond the human. So aliens are entities which we may find ourselves dealing with in an entirely pragmatic and non-moral fashion. What we usually call 'morality' is sympathy, what the Scottish philosophers called 'the moral sentiment.' Things like sympathy, empathy, solidarity, all presuppose something in common, certain emotional capacities, and I don't think there's any necessary progression of that beyond the human species. So in that sense, we have no obligations towards non-human entities of any kind whatsoever."

''Humanity is in a very funny position, because most people believe their minds or their souls are immortal. Ironically, if religious belief in immortality was to disappear, a kind of scientific belief in immortality or very long life will have taken its place. Possibly even a reality of it will have taken its place. On the whole span of human history, the number of people who have ever had to face up to a finite life span, and knowing death is the end, will probably be a little blip, a little minority in history. Maybe just us."

''My new book, Cosmonaut Keep, is the beginning of a new series which will be largely space opera. I'm hoping to have a lot of fun writing it, and to give my readers some enjoyment too. It is a move away from some of the earlier themes and interests, though we still have a capitalist America and a communist Europe, almost a satire – a mid-21st-century Europe dominated by Russia. But that's just the starting point of the space opera end of the story. It's based on humanity coming across, or being given (it's never entirely clear), two pieces of an impossible technology: a sort of anti-gravity aircraft, and a method of traveling at exactly the speed of light. When this magic engine is turned on, you subjectively are instantaneously at your destination, although objectively it takes you as long as the light would have taken to get there. I'm sure these are impossible, but at least they're not totally ruled out by relativity and so on, and it has some entertaining consequences from the point of view of plotting.

''The other part of the background is that there have been past alien interventions in the history of Earth, at least in the form of removing people and many other animal species, and transplanting them to a different part of the galaxy. So you're looking at variations on the kind of 'lost colony' SF trope."