1. We share a great admiration for Bujold. Which other female authors do you admire?

   Hah, this is where LibraryThing is so useful! Looking at female authors where I’ve read more than one book by them and given at least one book top marks: Ursula Le Guin, Connie Willis, Sherri S Tepper, Octavia Butler, Mary Gentle, Madeleine L’Engle, Joanna Russ and George Eliot, all of whom have their off days as well but are brilliant when on form; plus I very much enjoyed The Time Traveller’s Wife, Cold Comfort Farm and Fun Home, but am not aware of having read any other books by Niffenegger, Gibbons or Bechdel.
   

2. You started out as a scientist and became a historian. How did your scientific training inform your historical imagination? How did your historical training influence your understanding of science?

   I think the second is more significant than the first. I was always interested in science at least as much for Story as for Knowledge, which is why I found my way to the historical path. The doctrine of the social construction of knowledge is a very powerful analytical approach to What Is Really Going On, not just in science, but also in other walks of life; information is put together by people, and the human factor affects everything about it.
   

3. What poetry do you like?

   Hmm, I don’t actually read a lot of poetry – my speed-reading habits mean I don’t naturally linger on the page long enough to let it sink in. Doing my Eng Lit O-Level, Robert Frost appealed to me most. At the moment I am enjoying an exchange of smutty doggerel being posted between two of my livejournal friends, but I guess that’s not quite the same thing!
   

4. From my uninformed position, the future of Northern Ireland looks brighter than it has throughout my lifetime. Do you agree? To what do you attribute the successes so far?

   Oh yes. The crucial point was the realisation by the Republican movement that they were not going to win the armed struggle, and their gradual climbing off the philosophy of waging war. They did it too slowly, in my view; the campaign was not justified and secured nothing in 1998 which would not have been on the table in the 1970s in the absence of violence. There has of course also been a subsequent shioft from the DUP; but if the IRA had met their commitments on decommissioning sooner, the DUP would have remained the smaller Unionist party for a lot longer.

   There is another crucial factor as well which was the character of George Mitchell as chair of the talks process, and keeping the whole show on the road. He managed to gan the confidence of the participants in each other and in the process. It would have been much more difficult without him.
   

5. Which five fictional characters would you most like to shag?

   Hmm. I answered this one in July 2005, and have been reviewing my answers in the light of what I’ve been watching and reading since. I think I now have to change my original rankings quite a lot:

   5) Bernice Summerfield. Or possible Ashley Watt from Iain Banks’ The Crow Road.
   4) The Empress Alixana.
   3) Zoe.
   2) Phèdre nó Delaunay still at #2
   1) and Faith still has the top spot, as far as I am concerned.

From :

1. For work and fiction, how many different languages do you most frequently read in?

   Really mainly English. I can read easily enough in French, Dutch and German, but almost any significant document that reaches my desk at work is in English. I do end up speaking French and Dutch fairly often to interact with yer actual Belgians, and often pick up and scan the free Metro newspaper in either language (though mainly for the sudoku).
   

2. Roughly what are the percentages? (e.g. is English still the reading you do in the main? Not edged out by French?)

   Absolutely. I would be surprised if I spend as much as 1% of my time reading either French or Dutch, and for German it is even less.
   

3. Regarding memory: how often have you encountered a multi-lingual group where there isn’t a shared third language between the group, and you find yourself doing simultaneous translation? Add-on: how often has it gone pear-shaped and you’ve given the correct narrative in the wrong language to the given group/individual?

   A few times; though again the inexorable rise of English as lingua franca has probably made this kind of situation rarer than it was for my parents. I would say that it has happened most often in German, though I did once rather bizarrely finding myself interpreting in Russian which I barely speak. I had a couple of memorable moments of this kind in my last job: on one occasion, my colleague (who speaks Serbian but no French) and I (speaking French but no Serbia) met a Serbian contact who had French but no English. On another, I met with a monoglot Albanian contact who came with an interpreter who spoke French but no English; on that occasion I brought my own Francophone colleague to interpret for me. I have to say in these circumstances it is really rare to get the target languages mixed up as you speculate, though I’m not saying it never happens.
   

4. Regarding memory: remembering past conversations, dreams, of the written word – do you remember it in the language it was first absorbed in, or does the language melt away to the remembered meaning, or is it all translated to your mother-tongue?

   Usually the first – anything memorable is usually so because of the particular turn of phrase used, and that’s almost always something that can’t be easily translated without long and tedious explanation.