Martin Kippenberger

I always just wanted to write and maybe direct. I'm really only interested in that. And yet the business that I'm in has forced me into being a salesman - that's the last thing that 17-year-old me would imagine I'd end up being. I'm uncomfortable trying to sell anything, but that's what you're doing every time you walk into a pitch.

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.