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.

Angela also feels generic. She can’t compete with Bibi’s exoticism in a culture that pits girls against one another.

The action of the latter half of the story is set around a particular stretch of road in Cherokee National Forest. That road is the exact last place I’d ever want to run into hungry dead things, so of course I had to stick my characters there.

Some years ago Roger Penrose proposed the idea that the human brain relies on quantum properties for computation, using this to explain away self-awareness and intelligence (he was not the first or only person to express similar ideas, but he’s the best known).