about me...
INTRO
Auto-bios, even the short type, are weird. Too much temptation to rant on about one’s growing-pains, misunderstoodness and nonsense like that; often followed by false-modesty-but-still-self-congratulatory spiels of one’s personal resilience in overcoming obstacles, etc etc..
Still, readers may be curious. It’s also true that one’s life experiences, especially the ‘bad’ ones, are formative; as are the attitudes and philosophies they have bred. So, while I think that the best way to get to know an author is by reading her or his fiction—which is what I, for entirely selfish commercial reasons, I suggest you do ☺️—a bit of backgrounding may be useful.
I was born in Germany into a family of visual artists; surrounded by books and with TV being either unavailable or actively discouraged. I read like it was going out of fashion by the time I was seven, grew up on Grimm’s and Anderson’s fairy tales, Karl May’s adventures, American crime fiction, and German pulp sci-fi, especially the perennial Perry Rhodan series. There was also my exposure to RaumPatrouille Orion, first ever real sci-fi TV series, predating Star Trek TOS by just a few months and rather different—in a very Germanic kind of way—in concept and implementation. Truth be told, Star Trek was far more appealing, but I found that out only years later.
I also developed a very early preoccupation with mortality. Personal extinction, decided the 6-7 year-old, is a bad thing. To be avoided at all costs. When that breathtakingly unique creature you are is gone… Well, it’s gone. For good. For those of us whose lives are not an endless litany of dreadful suffering—perspective, peeps!—being alive seems infinitely preferable to being dead; forever with no way back to that precious entity you were before the lights went out for good. Never mind the myriad ways people have invented to make themselves believe things are otherwise. Quite a few decades later I still believe that what child-me intuited holds true.
After my compulsory 12-year stint at school—the last years spent at a high school whose focus was on languages (Latin hate, French blah, English cool), I finished the process without acing any of the language subjects (I sucked majorly at Commentarii de Bello Gallico) but doing great in physics and math, which were my favorite subjects, despite the teachers’ deficiencies—I went off to follow my interest in the stars, the universe, the multiverse and all that, and studied astrophysics for over a year; until one day I told myself “Enough school!”, walked out in the middle of a lecture; applied for and got an assisted passage immigration visa to Australia; just about as antipodean to my former life as I could go. I spent some time traveling around Australia and some of South and Central America, before resuming my studies in Australia and later New Zealand; this time mixing physics with the life-, computer- and cognitive sciences; which is probably why I kept on looking for the roots of, and maybe some explanation for, human cognition, mind and everything else about humans in fundamental physics. Along my way through academia I also collected a number of degrees, including a B.Sc. and an M.Sc in Physics, plus over a decade later an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science.
Degrees are handy things to have, but they don’t necessarily make one rich. I know mine didn’t, but they helped me learn a lot of things that I wouldn’t otherwise have learned. I continue to have an ongoing and lively interest in all aspects of science, with fundamental quantum physics, biomedicine and the very broad, fascinating realm of ‘cognitive science’ ranking at the top. However, for actually earning a living I soon branched out into computing and software engineering for many years, most of it in a biomedical and diagnostic context. In the late 1990s I gave software development away and converted myself into a technical writer, editor and occasional video producer.
After spending several years in the UK, US and Japan, my family settled in the only city I’ve ever actually truly liked—Dunedin, New Zealand—where we lived for almost twenty years. However, right now we’re camping out, for a while anyway, in inner-suburban Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; mainly so we can be close to our daughters and grandchildren.
Whatever happens next, who knows? Life has a habit of presenting one with the unexpected. That’s a small part of what makes it so fascinating.
And that’s the short-and-reasonably-sweet version. If you really, honestly want to know more—you have been warned!—click here.
Also, like I also mentioned on my landing page…
I don’t do social media.
I’ve had enough experience with wasting my precious time on medium that in its infancy had the prospects to become a boon, but which, despite its undeniable uses and even benefits, has turned into a pestilence, meaning a very infectious disease that kills and maims—physically, mentally, spritually and in every other way—far more people than it benefits; said ‘benefits’ mainly flowing to the profiteers who control the internet. Like InfoGen, the evil colossus I invented—though it’s not really an ‘invention’ anymore, is it?—for System Crash.
So, owlglass.net and other URLs linking to owlglass.net are the only personal internet connections to my work. However, my books are available from and therefore listed with most eBook distributors.