I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.

The most remote place I've been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours' boat ride from the nearest settlement.

I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.

I sometimes wonder why I do so much research - I look at other successful writers, and I think it must just be so relaxing to write about flying horses or something, but I have to make it plausible.

I did two master's degrees - aeronautics and astronautics, and the second one was technology and policy. That taught me how to think about issues in science and technology as they relate to the general public.

The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.

The nature of the internet is that you don't know who is behind the screen.

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.