From the Author

My background and much of the reason for my interest in futuristic conflicts involving technology and ideology.

Like many “baby boomers” born in the mid-fifties, WWII and the atomic bomb played in indelible part in shaping those interests.  This was theGolden Age of Science Fiction with books like Starship Troopers and I Robot being written, movies like Forbidden Planet and War of the Worlds being produced.  It was also a time when soldiers coming back from the war told electrifying stories of dreadful war machines they encountered on the battlefields of Europe: the Tiger, the Panther, ME-262 Swallow, all of which further sparked the imaginations of children like myself.  For me, those events set in motion a lifetime fascination with military history and how advances in tactics and technologies are constantly evolving to change the face of WAR - the locus of my SciFi stories.

So, what makes what I write different from other SF writers?  Most likely, it will be for the reasons described by the Meyers Briggs profile of an INTP.  INTPs, otherwise known as “the thinkers,” live in a world of theoretical possibilities seeing everything in terms of how it could be improved, or what it could be turned into.  The plots of my stories reflect my practical outlook of what the future may hold, they are a projection of socio-economic, political and technological trends carried to their logical conclusion: one, two, three-thousand years out.  Concepts like teleportation, light-speed space travel, intergalactic commuting, battleship-size spacecraft, time travel are set aside in favor of realistic possibilities, but this does not mean the reader loses out, my stories remain escapist works.  They are simply written to be within the realm of possibility.

I choose to write about conflicts that invariably involve two competing ideologies with one seeking to impose itself on the other.   War is the means by which each faction eventually grapples with one another, and like all wars, they are unromantic, horrible affairs with outcomes that can change the course of history.

But wars won’t exist?  One thing utopianists forget is best summed up by the adage, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  This passage from George Santayana holds true for the future just as it has held true for the past, it is the reason wars will, unfortunately, always be with us.  The causes of war will remain unchanged, it is how they will be fought is left up to the imagination.