I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

I've long said that if Canada has a role on the world stage, it's principally as a role model, a demonstration that people of all types can get together and live in peace and harmony, which is something we really do most of the time here.

I'm a very skeptical guy: my willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go very far when I'm reading other people's SF, and it goes even less far when I'm writing my own.

One gets a bit picky after having the success of something like 'FlashForward!'

I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.

If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is the world's greatest pure physics thinktank, and it's located here in Canada, in Waterloo, Ont.

One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.

Science fiction is about extrapolation, looking back through history, spotting a trend, and predicting where it will go.

We absolutely do some of the best science in the world in Canada, across a broad spectrum of disciplines: quantum computing in Waterloo, paleontology in Alberta, neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health in Vancouver, and many more.