Jean-Pascal Tricoire

When I see people with an interesting gap year, if they can explain it, if they can justify it, if they can show what they've learnt from it, it's sometimes more profitable or more intelligent than having been through a traditional, continuous race from high school to the end of university.

When you go for business, you just see the airport, the offices, cities. You never see what 80 per cent of the population does in a country, so if you want to understand what Indonesia is made of, or the depths of China or India, you have to go and see.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.