Thanks for joining me today and for your interest in Lockstep!

One thing I should say about foresight (which isn't quite the same as classical futurism) is that it's not about prediction. My colleague Jamais Cascio refers to it as getting "an innoculation against the future" and I would put it that foresight is the science of surprise—of innoculating yourself against it, and…

The issue of others being "more technically advanced" needs to be examined here. Humanity is currently in a period of technological expansion, and some people always mistake now for always, so assume that technology will continue to expand and develop without end. For them, there's infinite technological development…

The main answer is the same as the answer to why all the hibernating animals and plants in the north don't get eaten during the winter: they're so far away from the action, so hard to get to, have so little at any one time that might be worth taking, and are so distant from one another that it's just not worth it. I…

I've written some near-future stories, novellas mostly in my Gennady Malianov cycle. I haven't written a near-future novel, funnily enough, although I intend to correct that omission very shortly.

We can already do a kind of weak-kneed version of cold sleep. When I had heart surgery they literally put me on ice for the four hours or so it took to root around in there, so I've gone through it myself. So cold sleep is definitely possible, especially since there seem to be many different paths to achieving it. …

Oh, as to interstellar conquest, it's not so much the times and distances, as the fact that even the resources of one stellar system are nearly infinite. What exactly are you conquering for? The only reasons I can think of for trying it would be cultural.

I'm a big fan of Banks's Culture novels, but what I grew up on was the space operas of Andre Norton, and it's to her that I'm nodding with Lockstep. Lockstep is my attempt to do Norton, in the most respectful of ways. My favourite Norton books are The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars. Those were squarely in my mind…

Oddly enough, my foresight work tends not to be greatly influence by my SF in that I try not to speculate wildly as a futurist. I'm actually quite conservative in my projections. The one thing I do borrow from SF is a tendency to think in syntheses—in other words, to combine many different trends and disruptions at…

I don't think it would have been possible without the structure the locksteps allowed me. There's two kinds of balance to be found in the book: the first is generic, in that I chose to tell it as a sort of YA tale, with deliberate simplicity in those elements; the second is that Toby's experience of time is linear…

Ha! Great question—and the answer from my end would be no... ish. I like the universe of Lockstep, and in fact have some pretty amazing ideas for other works set in the same milieu. The story of Toby was intended to be a standalone, though.

Hi, John, and welcome to the chat! Yours is an interesting question, because there are often significant differences between serialized and final books—both because things are still being refined at the book publisher's end while the serialization takes place, and because for instance one can't always find convenient…