Here I'm not going to discuss mainstream literary work such as that of Jean Paul Sartre or Camus - thrillers is the topic, specifically techno-thrillers.

Now, you might think immediately of Tom Clancy, or maybe Craig Thomas, but Patricia Cornwell is also, to me, a techno-thriller author. When I read Cornwell, I believe pretty much everything - she was an ME and knows bodies inside out. What about Clancy or Thomas though? Their work is plausible, even when Thomas invented a new Russian plane, in Firefox, it was fairly credible to me.

Do you suspend belief when you read techno-thrillers, and as an author, what would you expect of your readers? My academic background is physics and oceanography, and I did find some of Clancy's writing hard to credit when I read it first, but I still enjoyed it. When he writes with co-authors in his later books, the story-lines, to me, are less credible. There's another discussion to be had there about an author maybe running out of ideas (or making the most of his market), but let's postpone that for another day.

Now, there are techno-thriller writers, very successful ones, whose work I cannot read. Some of it is down to style, and some to content. The work may not be plausible to me and grounds my enjoyment, even when the storyline is all action and racing along. When techno-thrillers are set well into the future, they become science fiction.

In my view, science fiction invents new technologies - for example a black hole interstellar drive for a spaceship. I argue that in between techno-thrillers and science fiction, there is a genre which we could call science-faction. This genre projects today's technology (or technology that is on the bleeding edge), into the near future. It is on the edge of belief. Of course, that depends on the reader too. It is in this genre where I would pitch some of Arthur C Clarke's work. With his prediction of earth-orbiting satellites, he was just ahead of the curve, but still original.

So, when I write - and I classify my work as science faction - I looked a little ahead into the future, projecting existing technologies (together with trends, politics and international events). I don't want my readers to say - "that's incredible" (literally) and maybe have their reading pleasure reduced. That is why I like to include a bibliography of research resources - so that readers can see a solid basis for my faction.

I do love science fiction though, and as I get older, more of it seems to become credible. I have seen Clarke's satellite prediction come to fruition during my lifetime, and there are aspects of William Gibson's work - e.g. 'jacking into the web' with a direct connection from a chip implant in the brain to the internet which I believe are not more than generation away.

Whichever one you go with, there is plenty of room for creative writers, and plenty of material for readers - whether they can suspend belief or not. In a way, I guess it's just a question of timescale - as we progress on the technology front, science fiction becomes science faction becomes reality. It may also be a matter of the reader's perception, based on their individual levels of technology awareness. Now that a writer cannot address!