Robert Webb

Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laugh.

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.