I prefer The Next Generation for TV (from "Yesterday's Enterprise" onward) and the Original Series cast movies. I am particularly fond of "Yesterday's Enterprise" for the series, and I think Star Trek VI is underrated in terms of the films.

I did go back in time and write books. My pen name was Robert Heinlein. I hope this clears up any confusion.

Speaking as a reader, I disagree EMPHATICALLY with the idea that it's usually easy to tell who is speaking by context, and one of the things that really chaps my ass as a reader is getting lost and having to go back and count lines to find out who is speaking what. So I don't do that to my readers — I always make it…

Well, that's your opinion. I disagree, which is why they're not in the novel. They're related to the novel and add to the understanding of the universe I create as a consequence of the novel, but they're not OF the novel, and adding them in wouldn't have helped the novel structurally and would have hurt it, in my…

In terms of Hollywood, before I was a novelist I was a professional film critic, and so I spent years writing about the business of entertainment in LA. "Agent" was the first novel I wrote, so I wrote about something I knew in a professional sense as the subject. With Redshirts, you can't really write about something…

Married and a father, yes to both.

I wasn't worried about going over too far into parody because that's not where I was aiming, and I have reasonable control of my instrument, as it were. When I was writing it, I wanted it to be obvious that Kerensky, Q'eeng et al were analogues to the Original Series folks — heck, Kerensky is named after a Russian…

I think there's certainly a place for barbed satire, and as a reader I enjoy it when it's done well. In the case of Redshirts, however, it wasn't really needed — the situation in itself was more than enough in terms of satire, and for me what I was interested in was putting basically normal people into what's a…

Since I currently have a movie deal there, not especially.

The stern older women sound like Diane Wilsdon to you? Wow. The Diane Wilsdon I knew back in the day was a total "hey everything is groovy" sort of hippie. Being married to Uncle Dave must have toughened her up a bit.

Knock yourself out.

Nope. The entire conversation about the codas went like this:

Coke Zero is the traditional Coke formula without sugar. Diet Coke is the "New Coke" formula without sugar. This is why ALL RIGHT THINKING HUMANS DRINK COKE ZERO.

It wasn't really ever a problem. I was a professional critic for a decade and a half before my first novel came out, which helped, because I knew how that sausage got made, so to speak. I also realized early on a) there's no chance that everyone is going to like what I wrote, b) even people who generally liked what I…

Whenever I have writer's block I think of my mortgage. And then my writer's block goes away!