Believe it or not, there was a time in my life when "Full-Time Fiction Writer" and "Professional Starcraft Player" seemed like equally realistic career options. I was 15 years old, and from the feedback I was getting from everyone around me, both options seemed equally viable. That is to say, not at all viable. From what everyone was telling me, it seemed basically impossible to make a living from either. But since there was literally nothing else that interested me enough to

It all started with a scare that turned more real than the United States government could have imagined. On August 23, 1954, Aviation Week and Space Technology released this story: “Pentagon scare over the observance of two previously unobserved satellites orbiting the earth has dissipated with the identification of the objects as natural, not artificial satellites. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, expert on extraterrestrial bodies from the University of New Mexico, headed the identificati

Two things got me into science fiction from an early age. The first was the Apollo moon landing. One of my earliest memories is watching astronauts walk on the moon, and from that point on I often daydreamed about doing the same. The second was Star Trek. If the Apollo mission inspired me to dream of being an astronaut, Star Trek fueled my imagination with fantasies of the galaxy and beyond. For me, the crew of the Enterprise were iconic and their adventures a sort of modern