Kenny Baker

I miss being able to play my instruments - I'm too much of a physical wreck these days. Playing the vibraphone gives me backache, leg ache, and everything-else ache, and the asthma means I no longer have enough puff to play harmonica.

I had a day off, and I was walking down the street one day, and this Mercedes pulls up alongside me, and Alec Guinness leaned out and said, 'What are you doing, Kenny?' I said, 'I'm just walking around,' and he said, 'Do you want to come and see an oasis with my wife and I?' There was nothing arrogant or flash about him at all.

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.