Of course, I may have an alter ego suffering from multiple personality disorder. However, my better guess is that McAndrew is an excuse. I derive great pleasure from sitting around, reading and calculating on matters of no earthly value and importance. I do this happily for hours and days, limited only by the arguments of conscience that I ought to be doing something useful and productive. To give one example, I have for the past five years tried, sporadically and unsuccessfully, to analyze a particular mathematical game. I can state the game simply, and to avoid (or possibly create) reader frustration I may as well do so. Two players, A and B, take turns throwing a die. There is a probability p that the die will show a score of 2, and a probability of (1 — p) that the die will show a score of 1. Given a whole number N, what is the probability that player A will be the first to reach a score of at least N?

I cannot justify wasting so much time on such a trivial game, except to use the all-work-and-no-play defense. However, if an area of apparently useless interest can one day become the basis for a McAndrew story, I have a rationale for my actions. Surely, if I write and publish a story, no one can say that all my preliminary reading and calculating was pointless.

As for an overall pattern to the stories, I do see a general trend. However, I suspect that the trend mirrors changes not in science but in me. If I had to categorize myself at the time I wrote “Killing Vector,” it would be as a practicing scientist whose knowledge of science fiction was mainly as a reader, a person who despite some first-hand experience of America and Americans was basically English, with an English wife and children. Today, twenty-one years and four or five million published words on, I would describe myself as a writer with a strong amateur interest in science; a person mostly American, with an American wife and children, albeit also a person with strong social and family ties to England and the English. And, a fact not to be dismissed, I am twenty-one years older. I am rather less interested in science, and more interested in people.