I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.
Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.
It doesn't really matter what "genre" your book is. What matters is that it's a good book of its kind. Whatever that kind may be.
We are very short on organs, and the pig solution is probably a lot better than the human clone solution - though maybe not for the pigs.
My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.
Mary Baker Eddy is said to have had a phone installed in her coffin just in case she happened to wake up. I've been told that's an urban myth. Somebody should check it out.
I saw all of the films [based on The Tempest] available, including the one with Helen Mirren in which Prospero is Prospera - you wonder, "Would it work?" But it does, because anything she does works.
Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.
If we read books all the time we would be very unhealthy, as we would not get any fresh air, exercise, or contact with nature. Also we would not spend time with other people. There are a lot of plusses to reading - it's an interactive brain workout - but like everything else that's beneficial in moderation, overdoses can be dangerous.
I've been involved in activities with other people who were put in jail. We were protesting the closing of the prison farm program at the prison I used in a previous book, Alias Grace. Some of us also put up money in order to save the heirloom herd of cows there. So I own half a cow!
There is so much going on all over the world that it's impossible for one person to keep up. And I can't.
I'm not an activist by nature. I am suspicious of Utopian thinking and equally suspicious of its alternate.
It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.
