I have memories - but only a fool stores his past in the future.

When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are in relation to them.

Who are we?' And to me that's the essential question that's always been in science fiction. A lot of science fiction stories are - at their very best - evocations of that question. When we look up at the night sky and wonder, 'Is there anyone else out there?' we're also asking who we are we in relation to them.

When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.

My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel - my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane.

The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn't really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.

Travel and timelessness mean everything to me, and making clothes that resonate with the modern it-girl is what I knew I needed to do.

I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. I didn't want people to see me as disabled. I wanted to live a life of adventure and stories.