It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strangeamps.

Today, science fiction, thinking the unthinkable.

What is it that people like so much about science fiction?

I think science fiction readers enjoy the experience of being thrown into an environment that they don't quite understand.

Science fiction used to appeal to a select audience, readers who liked the weirdness, the science, the speculative nature of it all,

and who maybe didn't care quite so much about literary style.

But some of the best new science fiction is coming from

writers with serious literary chops. For example, Michelle Faber's acclaimed novel, The Crimson

Petal and the White, was set in Victorian London. Well, now he's turned from the past to the future.

His new novel, called The Book of Strange New Things,

is the story of a Christian minister who travels the cosmos as a missionary,

bringing the Bible and the Word of God to aliens on another planet.

But in the meantime, his wife is stuck back on Earth,

where things are going downhill fast.

Faber told Steve Paulson he wrote the novel against a backdrop of personal tragedy. Michelle, you say that when you write a novel, you like to

get out of your comfort zone. So for your new novel, the book of strange new things, you didn't

plan anything out. Don't novelists normally have an outline for how their story will unfold?

I think different novelists work in different ways, and I'm sure that the journey into

the dark that I took is a journey that many other novelists have taken.

It's just not a way that I had written novels before.

What happened then when I had written several chapters in this manner

was that my wife, Eva, got diagnosed with an incurable cancer,

...