Arthur C. Clarke's three laws of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Tom Lloyd found himself with a long summer to spare before university, and decided to start a novel when it was suggested he get a job to pass the time. He first had the idea of writing a book to annoy a schoolfriend by getting published before him.

“I write because it's my way of making sense of the world. I've always loved reading, both to escape from real life and to make life more real, and I like doing both in my writing, too, writing straight realistic and fantasy stories.

“Inspiration is pretty much everywhere. I get it from reading both good and badwriting, from watching and listening to people, from landscapes and cityscapes, from wildlife documentaries and building sites and classrooms and music. My problem is not finding ideas but finding time to pin a few of them down to a page.”

Robert E. Howard started writing when he was 15, and was first published four years later when his story Spear and Fang appeared in the July 1925 edition of Weird Tales.

He wrote stories in many genres, but his most famous creations lie in the genre of sword and sorcery - a fantasy style with an emphasis on violent confrontations and a dark, brooding atmosphere. Many consider him to be the father of the genre. He created one of the most popular fantasy characters ever in the barbarian warrior Conan, who first appeared in The Phoenix and the Sword in December 1932. For his creation Howard developed the fictional Hyborian Age.

Dan Simmon’s first published story appeared on 15 February 1982, the day his daughter, Jane Kathryn, was born. He has always attributed that coincidence to “helping in keeping things in perspective when it comes to the relative importance of writing and life”.

“I just dive on into writing each novel, like a bulldozer rampaging through a shopping mall, leaving a trail of chaos in my wake, and making most of it up as I go along. This entails a huge amount of rewriting, and throwing away of surplus material, but I find it preferable to working to a rigid plan. My characters need to grow organically through their interactions with other people in the story – they don't have any reality for me until I'm at least halfway into the project.”

“The son of a homicide investigator, Scott recalls looking forward to dinner conversations, especially on evenings when company was invited, because most nights included at least one story of grim, true-crime, death or dismemberment that would have made poor Ellery Queen or even Travis McGee whimper.”

“Writing came from a love of reading. I was introduced to Sci-Fi and Fantasy after reading every Biggles book there is, beginning in my early teens. Creativity developed through consuming books and through long years of role playing games and I've been scribbling since the age of eleven – it's my favourite hobby. I will forever feel honoured and lucky to be paid for indulging in it.”

“In a close encounter with a kangaroo ... I could see the truth of evolution and continental drift in one brief scene.”

“The Fourlands was invented when I was in primary school, at the age of eight, back in 1982. It was a playground game between friends, and by the end of the year twelve kids were playing. I remember our adventures very intensely.”

John Brosnan moved to London in 1970 and started work as a filing clerk for the Inland Revenue’s Kensington office, before joining The Fountain Press as Publicity Manager. He gave up publicising other people’s writing to try his own hand at it in 1972, when his first book, James Bond in the Cinema, was published, and has been a fulltime writer ever since.

John’s first novel, the techno-thriller Skyship, came out in 1980, and was followed by a number of well-received SF thrillers and comic fantasies. As one half of the cult hero Harry Adam Knight, and under other pseudonyms, he wrote (either individually or as co-author) and scripted a number of horror/sf successes, including Slimer (filmed as Proteus), Carnosaur (filmed under that title for Roger Corman), The Fungus and Bedlam (filmed as Beyond Bedlam).

He has worked extensively as a film and television journalist and contributed all the Science Fiction film and TV entries for the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. He has been a book reviewer for Time Out, and a book and movie critic for Sight and Sound, Cinema, House of Hammer, New Scientist, Interzone, The Dark Side and SFX. For twenty years his satirical column, ‘It's Only a Movie’, appeared in the multi-media SF magazine Starburst.

John returned to his first love, science fiction, with Mothership, the tongue-in-cheek adventures of the handsome, brave, heroic – and not entirely intelligent – Prince Kender, and Jad, his boyhood chum and unwilling sidekick. The dashing duo, together with the beautiful but entirely unscrupulous Alucia, return in Mothership Awakening, which will be published by Gollancz later this year.

“Aged eight and dyslexic, I began writing a novel about a monkey who stole a NASA spaceship and escaped to the moon to live by himself. As the writing bit was too hard I ended up drawing everything except the first two chapters.”

“I actually prefer the term 'storyteller' to 'novelist' – as long as it’s understood that I do not refer to oral storytelling. In my case, 'writing' is inherent to 'storytelling'.”