I usually start a story believing I’m writing about one thing. But as the story unwinds, I usually find, a couple pages in, that I’m actually writing about something else entirely.

One of my colleagues wrote about was the idea of “requickening,” which, to vastly oversimplify, was the thought that by taking on a saint’s name, a convert also took on a part of that saint’s identity.

We all face loss, and we all face how cold and harsh reality can be at times. To see or feel that this is shared by all of us is powerful, even through as simple a vehicle as a science fiction story.

The Cold Equations” was originally published in Astounding Magazine in 1954, and was Godwin’s fourth published story.

It’s a cliché that when the aliens arrive, they appear over the White House, or Tiananmen Square. But why shouldn’t they arrive in the developing world?

Let’s face it: Crash landings are no one’s preferred method of parking. Mostly because you will die screaming if you crash land.

Galena came to me in a flash, fully formed and demanding that I should write about her. I have no idea where she came from, but I was not about to argue with her.

I’m interested in the notion of sentient A.I., and got more and more into the character as the story developed. I tried to make him real and unreal, to give him attitude, particularly in his view of humans.

At the back of my mind I’d had an idea about how contact with the alien would lead to us becoming progressively more alien ourselves. All I did was bolt that notion onto a simple war story and “Scales” was born.

He “saw” what he said he saw: Zeus in a toaster pastry. Rather, that’s what he perceived, since sight is a combination of what photons strike our retinas and how we interpret the resulting signals to the brain.