Frequently Asked Questions

          In a lot of ways, the answer to this one is the same as the answer to why I decided to write science fiction at all. My academic training is as a historian with special emphasis in military, diplomatic, and political history. That gave me a pretty good background in what human beings have already tried when it comes both the politics and to killing one another in the names of various disagreements, and one of my own favorite authors when I was younger [he still is one of my favorite authors, he just hasn't been around to write any new books in entirely too long] was H. Beam Piper. Anyone who's read his stuff knows how much history went into it -- and not just into his maritime stories. That was a large shaping factor on my own view of what science fiction was and certainly on what it was that I liked to read.

          In addition to the "this is what I enjoy reading and writing" factor, though, there's the fact that approaching the kind of story I'm most comfortable telling from a military and/or political perspective provides me with all sorts of source material. That may sound a bit peculiar when we're talking about writing science fiction, since science fiction is the literature of the future, after all. But if you really think about it, people are going to be pretty much people until we evolve into something we won't really recognize anymore. That means that looking at the way people have responded to certain types of pressures in the past ought to provide a pretty reliable template for how people would be likely to respond to those types of pressures in the future, as well. And that, in turn, means that it provides a science fiction writer with both examples and also with responses most readers are going to find plausible.