Here I am,trying the Carrie question again.It blew up on me before. Some of the most hardline "feminist" books around are by men (Rose Madder, Dragon Tattoo)maybe because men aren't afraid of being called unfeminine :) Try a website called terribleminds by @chuckwendig. He has a lot to say on this subject!

I think it's up to you to define it. It's your "wave." I come from the land of the gap (between first and second waves) and I see there was another sort of gap, round about the 90s and early 20s... Now the young women I'm hearing are fed up with, for instance, the casual acceptance of rape. I think manifestations…

How perceptive of you! Yes, that is what they do. Create social chaos, so folks will accept their form of order because it is preferable to total meltdown mess.

Thank you! No, I don't think about them at all. I just write books that interest me while I'm writing them. They need of course to be internally consistent, whatever the mode.

Thank you! In real history, although there is usually background buildup, such changes are often very sudden. I give you the French Revolution and the Russian one, and the switch from democracy in Germany to Hitler.

Why is this writing grey?

But ANYone in a truly repressive society has an inner monologue they are afraid to share! And anyone who feels in danger, and has an agenda that is rebellious towards authority, will have such a monologue. I give you Hamlet. I suppose it's a question of power... but even the powerful are not all Outside, without any…

How about "and"? It's so optimistic. And its story never ends, and...

Yeah, a lot of the earlier utopianists were of that mind. Then came Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler, and Pol Pot, and, oh, lots of lesser ones. Trouble is, the new world never did emerge from all of that in glorious wondrous form. I do remember with what glee we used to drop stones on our sandcastles. Maybe that's what…

I always loved Star Trek. Hmm. I'd have to give that some thought. It's a deep question.

Of course. I write fiction. Fiction is not "true." But it says so on the box, eh? There is no intention to deceive. It's not as if I'm writing autobiography, or political speeches!

I'd say some of them are near the San Andreas Fault, thoughtfully supplied with nuclear reactors by, um, us. (Earthquakes, anyone? See: Tsunamis.)

Thank you! I'm glad you appreciate "Zombies Run!" Naomi Alderman, its creator, will be pleased. You can go onto wattpad.com and find our dual-authored zombie novel,The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, for more escapades.

Hmm, that's suggestive! I set The Handmaid's Tale at Harvard because 1) I was familiar with the buildings, so handy, and the Wall, so convenient 2) Harvard started as a theological seminary in Puritan, Quaker-hanging New England, not exactly a hotbed of tolerance 3) It's "liberal" now – times change 4) But…

Hello: Genetic modification is not "one" thing. It's a took, and can have good or bad uses. The one where you kill the soil, treat seeds and plants with insecticides that do in pollinators, spray with amphibian-toxic weedkillers... I'd try to avoid that, myself. Labmeat on the other hand might be "good," in that no…

Hmm, a few millennia... I think it would take longer than that. In fact, as Crake points out in O+C, if our present civilization goes down we might never be able to reconstruct it, because we will lose the know-how built up over hundreds of years and erected — initially – on easily available surface metals. We are…

At our best, totally worth it. Can we be "saved?" We've been through botttlenecks before. As long as we don't kill the ocean, which makes the oxygen we breathe, "we" have a chance.

Here it comes.. it's not that I feel it "should" or "should not" be regulated. It's that I feel it probably – in the middle long run – can't be, because once you've made an easy-to-use tool, folks will play with it. But we human beings always want to make things that either fulfill our wishes or address themselves to…

Thank you! Well, I guess you just plunge in ... but many have written about them, including Nathanael Hawthorne. The Gardeners are quite benevolent as such things go. I always liked the Brother Caedfel murder mysteries, spolaced in a monastery. And of course the kibbutz idea was similar. What really intereted me…

Thanks so much!