I have taught history on the high school and college levels and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian The National Institutes of Health and numerous colleges and universities mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction an addiction and a tacit conspiracy.

To achieve lasting literature fictional or factual a writer needs perceptive vision absorptive capacity and creative strength.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages sometimes I write them in a column sometimes in a novel sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

I do love science fiction but it's not really a genre unto itself it always seems to merge with another genre. With the few movies I've done I've ended up playing with genre in some way or another so any genre that's made to mix with others is like candy to me. It allows you to use big mythic situations to talk about ordinary things.

They've also asked me now to start on another series that we're gonna do after this Frontier Earth. But it's not science fiction it's more in the Mystery and Crime division and that's another area I'm very interested in.

I started in this racket in the early '70s and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America of which I was like the sixth president I was the first one nobody ever heard of.