Ron Moody

I don't think a professional agent or theatre manager would say my career had gone as well as perhaps it should have after that first 'Oliver!' success, but then again I was never really intending to have a career in the professional theatre in the first place.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

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.