I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.