Inspired by television science fiction – and mortified by political futurism passed off as sci-fi and thrust upon me to read by my elders – I determined to create a brand new world of space adventures.

Why was everyone so dour in the books I read? I rarely could get near enough to any character to care, and the whole political thing left me cold anyway, although admittedly, I was very young (around ten years-old).

While those old ideas of future oppression are now crowding close around us, with advocates enthusiastically pushing to make it a global reality, I still look for adventure over doom-and-gloom any day.

Of course there’s adventurous science fiction out there now. It’s been a few decades since those sad days when I couldn’t find what I wanted in sci-fi and so determined to write it for myself. I’m pleased to see full human characterization now, not two dimensional anymore. There are adventures and real excitement, individuals coping with whatever they need to on a personal basis with realistic settings and proper human reactions. It’s wonderful!

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Television’s Star Trek was the first science fiction I encountered with a sense of humor. I was hooked straight away. Too young to be allowed to sit up and watch it, I would hide in the dark hallway and watch it from there, hoping that neither of my parents would get up to use the bathroom.

I wanted to write since I was eight. I was going to be a writer or a paleontologist. Naturally, my first stories centered on dinosaurs, but even there, I was on another planet with a band of explorers coping in the wild.

Spaceships, technology, colonization, alien worlds, wilderness planets and galactic empires – These always have and always will excite me.

So, when I knuckled down at the ripe old age of 12 to work solidly at the craft of writing, it really was a foregone conclusion. It had to be sci-fi.

Cheers! 😀

Allyson