When I was younger you wouldn’t catch me dead reading anything other than Science Fiction. Arthur C Clarke, Frank Herbert, Issac Asimov, Larry Niven, Philip K Dick, these were my abductors to off-world adventure and escape.

Even when I was supposed to be reading assigned books for English class (like Heart of Darkness or Puberty Blues or Shakespeare), I would speed-read, swerve and skim my way through so I could get back to some real stories, like Ringworld or The Mote In Gods Eye.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. —Philip K. Dick

Somewhere along the extrusion of my own life narrative, somewhere between discovering girls and retiring from nursing, the SciFi genre fell away to be replaced mostly by Travel stories, longform magazine articles and creative non-fiction.

Recently I decided to dip back in. I have no real idea who the ‘modern’ abductors of choice are. So I’m settling in here with Adrian Tchaikovsky (for no other reason than the fact he has a cool name).

If you are also an aficionado of Science Fiction (or fantasy) and can point me to some contemporaneous veins of starlight I would be greatly appreciative.

PS I’ll let you know how this book pans out soon.