Every time someone tells me that science fiction is dead I think of Al Reynolds, because he very clearly isn’t. His sales are huge, and Gollancz recently signed him to a 10-year, million-pound deal. Whatever it is he does clearly works for large numbers of people.

And what he does is space opera on a grand scale. House of Suns is very much in that vein. It has clone families that meet up every 1,000 years for a reunion, and really do live that long. It has an independent robot civilization. It has a very strange library with even stranger librarians. And one of the major plot points is that the Andromeda galaxy just vanishes one day. No warning, no boom, just one day it isn’t there. Yes, there is a market for that sort of thing.