But these transparently “activist” moments are forgivable, as is the pathological coffee drinking, a tic that recurs so relentlessly that I don’t think Larsson realized it was a tic. A thought on this subject: Many of the Larsson faithful subscribe to a belief that the author’s premature death was not of natural causes. He had been threatened in real life by skinheads and neo-Nazis; ergo, the theories go, he was made dead by the very sorts of heavies who crop up in his novels. But such talk has been emphatically dismissed by Larsson’s intimates. So let me advance my own theory: Coffee killed him.

1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud, blood and blasted landscape of No Man's Land gone?

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive - some said mad, others dangerous - scientist when she finds a curious gadget - a box containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way Mankind views his world for ever.

And that's an understatement if ever there was one...

The 'Long Earth' is a (possibly infinite) series of parallel worlds, similar to Earth. The "close" worlds are almost identical to 'our' Earth, others differ in greater and greater details, but all share one similarity: on none are there, or have there ever been, human beings. The books will explore the theme of how humanity might develop when freed from resource constraints: one example Pratchett has cited is that wars result from lack of land - what would happen if no shortage of land (or gold or oil or food) existed?

Early author photos on the back of many of his novels show a balding Koontz with a mustache. After Koontz underwent hair transplantation surgery in the late 1990s his subsequent books have featured a new clean-shaven appearance with a fuller head of hair. Koontz explained the change by claiming that he was tired of looking like G. Gordon Liddy.

Koontz does not spend much time on partisan politics, and doesn't believe politics solves many problems. Since 1988, however, he has contributed almost $73,000 to conservative, Republican candidates and causes. He donated to the 2008 US Presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain. He and Mrs. Koontz have contributed over $138,000 to Republican candidates for federal office and Republican organizations (1991–2009). In 2005, he supported Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger with $5000 in cash donations and more than $100,000 for a fund-raising dinner for 123 guests.

If you stop at the end of Dune you'll get the idea it is one kind of story, when it is really kind of an indictment of that kind of story.

FH:           And there’s a point here that I think should be made. Campbell turned down the sequel. Now his argument was that I had created an anti-hero in Paul in the sequel, and he has built his magazine…I’m…’I’m oversimplifying…grossly oversimplifying.
 
WM:       Sure.
 
FH:           But this is the essence of it really and truthfully accurate…
 
WM:       Yes.
 
FH:           That he had built his magazine on the hero. Now it’s my contention that the difference between a hero and an anti-hero is where you stop the story, and if you’re true to life, if you’re true to life, giving these ingredients, then the story goes on, because human beings go on. Now, you can confine your story to one individual, and therefore as far as he’s concerned the story begins with birth and ends with death. But if you’re dealing with larger movements...
 
WM:       The parameters are much broader.
 
FH:           That’s rihgt…as they are in this book.
 
WM:       Yes.
 
FH:           Then there is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story. And one of the reasons, by the way, why in the book “Dune” I stop it the way I do, deliberately building up a carrying momentum, as though you were going down a slide and then just chopping it…
 
WM:       To a moment of triumph and than that’s it…
 
FH:           And then you skid out of the story with all of this clinging to you.

At a book signing at Foyles in London, England, on 11 April 2012, Banks briefly described The Hydrogen Sonata as being "about the whole subliming business".