(I loved it, and it is a brilliant, brilliant book, so what does that say about me?!) On your blog, you recently mentioned that one of your ideas from Debatable Space actually turned out to be true, saying, "To be honest, as a science fiction writer with no science degree, I had only a smattering of a grasp of how such a spaceship engine would really operate. It just, er, kinda sounded good..." How much research did go into Debatable Space, though? There were quite a few good ideas in there, and while I have no science degree either, I could tell it wasn't (all!) made-up!

A: I’ve been reading science fiction since I was 11 (I can’t remember the first book, but it ended up with the protagonist being eaten alive – I guess that trauma of that is what made me so strange…?) And I’ve been reading books on science avidly from about the same age. I love science, and scientific ideas, but have never had any formal scientific qualifications.

So to write Debatable Space I read a number of hard books on quantum physics and superstring theory and was rather chuffed to come up with the concept of Quantum Beacons, which is a way of faster than light travel which doesn’t (as wormholes do) violate Einsteinian physics.

But beyond that – I relied on instinct, and refused to get hemmed in by detailed explanations on how the spaceships work, or how the laws of physics are understood by the characters. Other SF writers do such stuff brilliantly, and I admire them for their erudition and their talent; for me, though, it’s all about story, and how characters are affected by the story.

I did have a qualm though on reading the proofs when I read a line about Lena’s spaceship having an ‘ion drive’. What the hell, I thought to myself, is one of those? It must have been a phrase that stuck in my mind from another SF novel I’d read. So I was a bit nervous about being caught out in a scientific solecism. Then I read about the spaceship Dawn, recently launched, which has an ion drive, which I now discover is the best possible way to power a spaceship. So luck was on my side there.

For me, one of the joys of SF is extrapolation, wonderful ideas about what might possible, based on what actually is possible. And I hope Debatable Space has extrapolations that entertain.

As a scriptwriter for film and TV, what would you say has been the biggest change in writing a full length novel, and how have you coped? Would you say your other experiences at writing, even if in different areas, has helped?

A: I think the experience of writing film and TV and radio has been hugely beneficial to my SF novel writing. The pressure and intensity of being a jobbing writer for telly has forced me to think hard, again and again, about how to tell a story. How to make the protagonist drive the story. How to weave in reversals and twists. And, most important of all, how to rewrite. Everything I write, I rewrite and refine a dozen times. In TV, if you don’t do that, you get sacked, so you do it.

Having said that, the joy of writing novels is in the freedom it offers. Writing for TV – I did about 14 BILL episodes at the start of my career, a real school of hard knocks – is all about adapting your vision to someone else’s vision. It’s about being obedient. Writing novels is about being original, having a voice.

Most of the fun I’ve had as a writer (prior to now) has been working for radio. There’s a similar freedom – once you’re commissioned, you’re trusted to deliver. If you don’t get it wrong, you don’t get told to do it again; though if you do get it wrong, well, then the script editing is fierce and focused and rightly so.

The biggest difference in writing a novel is that there are more words. That sounds facetious – but really, it’s just awesome how much more there is to do. Every section in Debatable Space is the equivalent of writing a feature film script. So time management and stamina have become real issues for me.