If you were to write a sci-fi novel what would it be about? For me, I’d write a story centering around the Dyson Sphere.

Well, let’s see. I might co-author a science fiction novel about a far-future, post-scarcity society with near-Culture-equivalent technology, though I prefer my science fiction on the hard side, so no faster-than-light travel. It would be set on a world colonized by humans, but since there’s no FZtL, it’s have to be settled by generation ships.

I think this society, having lost its connection with its own past and lacking any sort of context or sense of its own history, might turn inward, developing strong AI that its members worshipped as gods, mainly through ritualized group sex.

In fact, that sounds like so much fun, my go-author and I could turn it into a series, with each book examining a different area of philosophy or metaphysics in the subtext, beneath all the super-kinky sex.

Or maybe I could do-author a science fiction novel a little closer to home. I’ve always liked cyberpunk, so perhaps something along those lines. But not, you know, the vaguely Orientalist cyberpunk of yore, with its megacorporation keiretsu with cybernetically augmented salarymen acting as private-sector assassins defending their corp overlords from cyberjockeys waging war in cyberspace.

No, I prefer something grittier, more grounded in reality—less neon and chrome and more run-down LA barrios, less cyberspace and more autonomous robot dogs with sniper rifles, less sprawling underworld of gilt nightclubs and more pervasive surveillance linked to AI facial recognition. That might be just the thing to take cyberpunk in a new direction.

Or he’ll with it, maybe I’ll co-author a weird urban fantasy set in London in 2016, where a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a small webhosting firm in Shoreditch gets caught up in a long-running underground war between a guild of spellcasting sex workers and a secret cult of Objectivist Tory rage mages, set against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum.

You know what? Hell with it, I think I’ll do all of those.