There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person.
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.
My personal feeling about science fiction is that it's always in some way connected to the real world, to our everyday world.
It may be far in the future, but there's some kind of logical way to get from where we are to where the science fiction is.
When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware.
Hard to be a physics major at Rice University if you have flunked calculus.
