Science fiction often shows a gloomy future world, a miserable place of political oppression and the downfall of democracy and freedom – kind of like the present push to deindustrialize our world and put us back to hunter-gatherer existence, only without fire and not allowed to eat meat – Frankly, I’m sick of the human-hatred that goes on in the name of environmentalism, and I’m sick of the destruction done to our planet by people who hate people and who would rather dig up entire forests and ship it as woodchips across the world to burn than burn the black stuff that comes out of the ground, you know, the stuff that isn’t an ecosystem – I’m also tired of seeing science fiction used to promote the idea that the human animal is some kind of an abomination on the world – So let me be perfectly clear – I write science fiction about HEALTHY WORLDS and PEOPLE WITHOUT GUILT, I don’t deliver green messages and I don’t do human-hatred.
Yes, there is still a challenge my characters have to face in my books, a threat of typical galactic proportion, but then that’s rather expected in sci-fi, yet people are people and planets are lush and thick with wildlife, most of which are uninhabited – just like our world actually is, if only people would pull their heads out of the cities and realize that urbanization isn’t the only thing out there.
I’ve lived in raw nature. I spent five years in the subtropics of Australia on a wilderness block with no house, no water on tap, no sewage or electricity mains. And I mean I LIVED there. I didn’t have a job to escape to every day, my job was the land, getting water, organizing power and dealing with wildlife that tried to take over our camp at every opportunity. And no, I was not part of a commune, nor was I one of those eco-loonies who call themselves Green, or worse, a Watermelon (Green on the outside and Red inside). It was just Greg and I living a dream.