Are you one of the writers who writes from an outline, or do you write with a general idea of what's going to happen and then go from there?

I won't exactly call it an outline, but I have an idea of where I'm going and something about how I'm going to get there. But because a novel is a process of discovery, I have to leave myself room to discover things. And the thing with doing too much research is you can do so much that it holds back your imagination. The imaginative reach can maybe take you to something that the historical research or the factual research will not yield by itself. And you've got to be able to make that leap, because the research you're going to be looking at, whether it's history or whether it's science, is going to be limited by what is known. It's going to be limited by a certain kind of outlook. And you've got to be able to look past that.

Speaking specifically of historical novels, I've often thought that if you're writing historical fantasy, in some sense to certain persons, that might be closer to the actual experience of particular historical periods or particular cultures than if you write from, say, the totally realistic point of view and you write a novel of facts. Because when I was writing about Mongolian culture, you're writing about a culture that believes in shamans. You're writing about a culture which believes magic of certain kinds to be real. In order to capture that, you almost have to approach a kind of historical fantasy. If you write it totally as a realistic story, you may be missing that.

And doing research, you ought to be careful not to get to the point where then you can let that inhibit you from making a certain leap that maybe will give you an insight that novelists can offer that a historian can't, that a scientist can't.

Do you think that you gain something with historical novels from writing about characters who, in one sense or another, are already known to the reader? In other words, they know a little bit about Genghis Khan but they haven't gotten inside his head.

Well, that's a challenge that you have to face. It means you're going to be dealing with the preconceptions that people might have. And then you might have a reader who will look at this and say, "No, that isn't the way I see it." In other words, you're going to be violating certain ideas that people have. I'm not in the business of presenting Genghis Khan as he actually was. I'm in the business of presenting what I think are certain insights into how he might have been seen by people around him, what the culture was like.

On a different track, your work often features strong female protagonists, but what about the real world in science fiction. As a woman in the science fiction field, do you feel as if anything has changed in the years since you published your first novel, in 1976?

The short answer is yes. I don't think anybody now would question that. The notion that no women like science fiction and all that, that particular question, that's gone. Are there other women who are prominent in the field? Do you have influence in the field and everything? Well, obviously. So that's gone. If there's anything going on now, it's a little more subtle. And I actually think that battle for women basically has been won. I don't even think it's an issue any more, although I do find it interesting that when you're talking about the really hard, cutting edge science fiction, it still does seem to be mostly guys. That is still true. I'm not sure why that is. In other words, where is the female Stephen Baxter? If there's a female version, I'm not sure who yet.

Do you think that you'll edit more anthologies of women's science fiction?

I would like to, and I actually did propose doing another Women of Wonder to Harcourt. And that was a couple of years ago. And they didn't seem interested at that point, and I'm not sure if they would be interested now. But it's possible that maybe after another couple of years, there certainly would be room to do some more, to get in writers who were not in the others, to talk about what has happened since the '90s. And so it's something that's sort of floating around back there. Whether anything will come of it or not, I don't know.

Ironically enough, one of my editors at Vintage Books, who did the first three books, was actually instrumental in actually recommending one to Harcourt. Because she was doing some work with them at the time. So I'm assuming that it's possible a time may come again, especially given the way things are going in the culture right now, where we seem to be rapidly heading back towards the 19th Century again. It may very well be that we're going to need another Women of Wonder.

What do you mean by that? The politics?

Certainly the political situation, the general culture situation. I feel that I am moving in a much more conservative culture in many ways. I shouldn't say conservative, because that's libeling conservatives. I should say a more repressive culture that even 10 years ago, certainly than 20 or 30 years ago. It's just amazing to me. I mean, things that I would have thought would have been settled are apparently not, in the minds of anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of my fellow citizens. And given that, it may very well be by 2008 or 2010, assuming we last that long and we still have a democracy, and we still have anything resembling the United States, you know, western culture in general, that we may need another Women of Wonder. We'll need a lot of other things, too.