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Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.

I always was going to be a writer. The other jobs were just to keep me in food. Though I enjoyed the archaeology.

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

The grounding in natural sciences which I obtained in the course of my medical studies, including preliminary examinations in botany, zoology, physics, and chemistry, was to become decisive in determining the trend of my literary work.

In 1989, I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.