Madeline Carroll

I think girls from a young age know what they want, and boys kind of have to keep up and catch up to them. Even in kindergarten, girls are pretty much the ones that like the boy first and the boys are like, 'Oh, I want to play with my trucks.' They think it's not cool. I think girls are definitely more ahead than boys.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

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.