If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.
Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.
I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.
In a certain sense, this guy - who is one of the most evil people in the book - he's not really that bad at running the show, because he knows what he's doing, he's smart and he's got the big picture in mind. He's like the Godfather.
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.
There is grand romance in The Lord of the Rings. It's an important part of epic literature.
We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.
Dune is the bestselling science fiction book of all time. It's something you really need to read in your lifetime. If you're going to read The Lord of the Rings, which everyone should, then you have to read Dune, too.
My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.
I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.
I think now I'm up to something like 85 different titles that I've published.
Sure, President Bush can say that the U.S. government won't fund stem cell research, but believe me, Japan is applauding. Because they will just do it first and get all the patents.
Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too.
Do you want Columbus to go across the ocean, or do you want to put a message in a bottle and hope that it lands somewhere? I'd rather have actual people be there. Whether they look like Americans or like the inhabitants of some other country, depends on who has the most drive.
I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.
I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.
SHADOW PROWLER is a fresh, exuberant take on territory that will be familiar to all fans of classic high fantasy. Alexey Pehov introduces a cast of charming, quirky, unsavory, even loathesome characters in a fast-paced, entertaining adventure.
For a feature in next month's issue of Prog magazine, the photographer spent many hours setting up a photo shoot of me with part of my music collection in my writing office. Since I do most of my writing outside in nature, we felt this shot was most representative.
Of course you don't make any noise in space, because there's no air.
When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.
I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.
It was like there was a pile of kindling that was in the back of my imagination just waiting there. Once I lit it, it just flared up and I kept getting ideas and ideas.
The great secret behind classified projects is that most of them are so utterly boring and uninteresting that James Bond wouldn't even take a second look at them.
I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.
