News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we've tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.

TV is like high school because you go into these series, and the people that work there have been doing it for seven years, like 'One Tree Hill,' so you are going into what is already a family - if you are accepted by that family, then it's fantastic fun.

Truth be known, President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

We'd never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn't been for space exploration and NASA.