Your new novel is called Blue Remembered Earth. What’s it about?
Well, this is a big departure for me. It’s my attempt to get back to something a little bit closer to the present in terms of the way I think about science fiction. So it’s a novel which looks at where we might be in a hundred and fifty years in terms of going out into the solar system, going back to the moon and Mars, but also looking at the Earth, the kind of trends that we might expect to see over the next century and a half on our own planet—things like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and ubiquitous surveillance technology.
