Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry - you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.

I'm mostly a novelist these days but I have written short stories in Fantasy Science Fiction and horror.

Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now the novelist must take a good hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Oh I'm nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading and I'm nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I'm working on right now. It's a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare and it's going to be fun.

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

Before I was reading science fiction I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.