Eric Craig asked Warren Dean:

Is it a fantasy, or a science fiction? What made you think of this interesting mashup in The Forever Gene?

Warren Dean I once read an article by Stephen Donaldson, one of my favourite writers, who said that most good speculative fiction involves the intersection of two disparate ideas, the one familiar and the other alien. In his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, he used this to great effect by putting a character suffering from Leprosy (the familiar) into a fantasy land of great beauty, vitality, and evil (the alien).
Neil Gaiman said something similar about the way he came up with the concept of his novel Stardust. He often used to drive past a little forest on the other side of a stone wall, and thought that this would be a great setting for a fantasy story. But it was only when he came up with the idea of a shooting star (which turns out to be something else) falling to Earth beyond the forest that the novel came together.
Other examples I can think of: Harry Potter - kid goes to boarding school... for witches and wizards; Ender's Game - kid goes to boarding school... for starship commanders.
I have long been fascinated by the human genome project, and the idea that it is theoretically possible to extend our lifespans by manipulating our genetic code, and I often thought about writing a story about this. But there wasn't much of a novel in it until I asked myself the question: What would happen if extraterrestrials were attracted to Earth by this technology for mysterious reasons of their own?

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