I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.

In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.

I didn't enjoy my college life in Noida much because I was quite disoriented there, since I was staying away from my family.

I like being a mother. For some people, it's so much work that it can be a burden. But it's not for me, maybe because I had my daughter, Valentina, later on in life, at 41.

I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom.

It's not easy to leave your hometown and your family and your support system and come out to Los Angeles to - to pursue a dream where the odds are not in your favor.