Spectrum Blog Hop

Welcome to the Spectrum of Speculative Fiction Blog Hop, where you’ll get to meet a spectrum of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction Authors.

Many of us are offering giveaways for visiting our blogs. I will be offering a free e-copy of my novelette, The Thing Down the Road, to one lucky winner (with the possibility of additional swag). To win, please leave a comment to my blog. At the end of the hop, a winner will be announced.

My novelette, The Thing Down the Road was published in February 2012 by Musa Publishing (www.musapublishing.com). It is a mixed genre of science fiction/horror. Normally I don’t write in the horror genre, but writers go where the story takes us. In this case into the psychological darkness of a character driven too far.

People ask why I write science fiction. Well, when I started writing I experimented with different genres, but science fiction has been my passion since high school. I can still remember my first introduction. It was a typical Phoenix summer, too hot for even a trip to the pool. I’d never been much of a reader prior to that weekend, but I was so bored I asked my older brother for something to read. He handed me The Hobbit. Two days later I asked for more and he moved me into the Lord of the Rings. These were my gateway drug. His library was never safe again.

Tolkien and Heinlein have always held a special place in my heart. Kind of like sex, one author was my first, while the other taught me how it was really done. As a sophomore in high school I’d tried to read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but couldn’t grasp the concepts. After a stint in the Air Force as a radar technician and several courses in computer programming, I gave it another try, the book that is. Suddenly the science was real. The concept of Artificial Intelligence wasn’t unfathomable. It was the moment I knew I’d come of age.

Science fiction is what I read, what I watch, so of course what I want to write. In this genre almost anything imaginable is possible, somewhere, some when. I can’t recall the author, but I remember his story that in history class he was caught reading a science fiction. When the teacher called him on it, his response was that he WAS reading history. It just hadn’t happened yet.

All we have to do is reach into our pockets or purses to find technology that at one point was only conceived of in the mind of a science fiction writer. Cell phones, tablets, biomedical devices… the list grows daily. Private companies are developing space tourism. Just in this last year FTL is no longer considered impossible.

I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I have an imagination. I see us out among the stars one day, traveling faster than light, and maybe finally meeting others with the same insatiable drive to reach further than ourselves. As I see it, if we are all made of stardust, then our attempts to reach the stars are not efforts to escape our home, but endeavors to return to it.

Thanks for visiting my blog. I pose this question to you and look forward to your responses:
What discovery in the last ten years impacts your life, or your imagination most.

You can visit my website at www.tlsmithbooks.com to see what I’m working on. I currently have two novels making their way around publishers in New York, so keep checking my blog, website or Facebook page for announcements.

HAVE FUN