about me...
INTRO
Auto-bios, even the short type, like this one, 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.
Bottom line: With very few exceptions, I don’t like them much.
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 think you should do!—a bit of backgrounding and opinionating of the kind you’ll find below may be useful.
Warning: It’s quite lengthy. Been edited and added to over the years.
STARTING OFF
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 years-old, is a bad thing. 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 tend to keep looking look 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. 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.
WRITING
Since about the age of 20, I had wanted to be a ‘writer’. Actually it probably came even earlier, sometime in my late teens. However, the urge was unformed and embryonic at best. When I finally got around to taking it more seriously, the change of languages from my native German to English—a language I favor over German by far; with only Spanish, which I learned as a youngster by spending lots of time in Spain, being a serious competitor—held things up quite a bit. Serious and other-than-crappy writing didn’t manage to get a decent foothold in my life until sometime in the late 1990s. I attribute the ability to write decent English to the influence of the American writer Jack Vance, every one of whose prodigious output of novels and stories I’ve read during my German-to-English… Well, let’s call it ‘conversion’. It didn’t take long until I started think, dream and of course solely write in English. An occasional smattering of Spanish comes into that as well, especially after being exposed to Spanish speakers for more than just a few minutes. I learned the language when I was a child through listening to and speaking it, so part of my brain—meaning of me!—is Spanish; far more than, as one might expect, German. Fascinating…
There also was a young family, which changed life’s priorities. Family comes first. Always. Never mind about all the I-want-to-fulfill-myself-and-be-an-artist nonsense. If you haven’t got your priorities right, then what good are you? ‘Self realization’ or ‘validation’, which is what artists are usually after, whether they know and/or admit it nor not, is at its core a vacuous goal.
Now—after dozens of novels, stories and screenplays, as well as writing, producing and directing a feature-length romantic comedy of errors with a budget of less than $NZ 800 —with my two daughters grown up and one of them having kids of her own, and me finally being gloriously what’s in my case is misnamed ‘retired’, I’m writing more than ever. It's a good way to spend life. Truth is, I’m addicted to it. Tried to give it up once for a couple of years, because it takes up a lot of time. No matter how hard one tries it will create priority conflicts with the things that should have priority. But giving it up didn’t work. Couldn't detox myself and was getting a somewhat neurotic in the process. You think smoking’s addictive? Ha! I was a smoker once, a long time ago, but managed to kick that habit; so I know what I'm talking about.
I don’t claim to be ‘inspired’. Maybe some people are, though I suspect ‘inspiration’ is a heebee-jeebee word invented to describe a perfectly natural cognitive process. My personal recipe for what to write about and not getting writer’s block is to write what I would like to read; stories populated with characters I find engaging, either because I love them or because they’re epitomes of what I don’t love. Throw in the basic parameters of the human equation: love, hate, generosity, greed, loyalty, betrayal, hope, fear, life, death, sex, peace, war, violence, forgiveness, retribution, curiosity, misunderstanding, reconciliation, ambition, surrender, cowardice, courage, and whatever else happens to come along. Among all that, it’s about human beings trying to find their way through the minefields of that mysterious thing called ‘life’; attempting to eke a meaning from it; while others, for reasons perfectly valid to themselves, do their best to put obstacles in their way.
My main literary influence remains Jack Vance, and never mind that there are a lot of other influences as well. But Jack’s Lyonesse trilogy is, to me at least, the most enchanting fantasy ever written. I reread some of Jack's work at least once a year, just to remind myself what good prose is like. I’ve kind of…developed away, I guess… from the close-to-Vancean science fiction of my early Tethys series novels. Already was on the way to that by the time I reached the third one in the series of (currently) five. Which is as it should be. You either develop and maybe grow, or you’ll write the same stuff again and again. I mean, in a way you always do, but there’s got to be more than that. For your own sake.
While my original genre of choice was science-fiction or something science-fictionesque with lots of world-building and occasional fantasy overtones, I had a lot of fun trying out historical and contemporary suspense romance. I believe that good, engaging stories, written or cinematographic, convey the truth about the human condition and its complexities better than any learned, ‘popular’, or ‘spiritual’ non-fiction treatise ever could. I’m not into ‘message’ stories or literary self-indulgences either. They’re just preaching, demagoguery and only serve to reinforce existing convictions in those who are eager to find reinforcement wherever they can possibly get it. Way I see it, entertain first of all and slip any messages in under the radar. Let them sit there for a while and maybe from a tiny seed I planted a tree will grow.
I love fairy tales; probably because I grew up with them: the real thing; pure Brothers Grimm, unadulterated by political correctness and cutesy sanitization. Maybe that's why I love Bill Willingham's comic series, Fables, which is like the Brothers Grimm's tales—and every other fable ever concocted, including and freely mixed in with others you wouldn't expect—on speed. I sense the presence of a kindred soul, who obviously loves these stories just as much as I do.
The focus of my novels and occasional screenplays is on people; specifically other people than myself! They may come out of my imagination—where else?—but they’re not about me. The stories are about those people. A lot of contemporary writers of popular and applauded fiction seem to find that impossible to do. Maybe I’m overstating this, but I feel that the literary Zeitgeist has sunk into a quagmire of sacralized narcissism passing itself off as ‘literature’. It’ll take a while to get itself out of the morass it’s in. Social media and the pernicious effects of brain-deadening memes on peoples’ psyches no doubt have a lot to do with that.
Which reminds me: I don’t do social media. Owlglass.net and any other URLs linking to owlglass.net nowadays are the only personal internet connection to my work. My books are on Amazon and Smashwords (plus the eBook publishers Smashwords sends eBooks to; e.g. Barnes and Noble, Apple). I spend minimal time on maintaining anything to do with social media. I have had enough experience with wasting my precious time on them.
Back to what I write about…
People have to face the world and their place in and relationship to it. Therefore, lurking somewhere hidden inside my tales you’ll always find a serious framework of ethical and everyday-life issues, questions, suggestions. This includes my views on history and human destiny and its manipulation by those who would aspire to do so, however beneficent their putative reasons; social versus personal obligations; weighing society’s taboos against personal feelings; coming of age, whether it be in one’s youth or later life; finding one’s destiny; finding meaning; struggling against ethical turpitude; having hope. And staying alive of course; for only then can there be hope. When you’re dead there nothing at all. And let’s face it, nobody can even imagine ‘nothing’.
I'm also preoccupied with the question as to whether the decisions we make in life should be considered as instances, or examples, of 'higher principles', or maybe 'ideals', in action; or whether 'principles' are, at best, over-simplified descriptors of the infinite variety of the possible. I’m not a fan of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. Following it tends to breed zealots and brainless ideologies.
My world-building occasionally can freak me out a bit. In Seladiënna, a contemporary fantasy novel written in the early 1990s, we have a parallel world where Earth climatically was pretty much like what you might expect to be coming our way soon—what’s already kind of here. It was just a novel, whose backdrop was a very-warm parallel Earth, populated by domineering water sprites and their worshippers and enemies.
System Crash, also first written in the early 1990s, incorporated themes around a grotesquely pervasive internet-like network and those in almost complete control of it, plus some speculations about Artificial Intelligence and the nature of ‘personhood’ and consciousness that might be achieved in AGIs with the right hardware and ‘education’.
As of recent I've also become kind-of re-obsessed—meaning I’ve been obsessed with it for many years (long before MARVEL thought of making movies about it!) but now it’s come back again with a vengeance—with what is called the 'multiverse'; a version closely resembling David Deutsch’s, with infinite block-universes thrown into the mix to really mess with our existing philosophies and intuitions. Other continuing preoccupations include artificial intelligence, especially of the 'intelligent, conscious robot'—or maybe 'Replicant'—kind. The multiverse and AI may appear like disconnected areas of enquiry, but I think they're connected through questions about the nature of consciousness, ‘personhood’ and 'agency'. I have always been deeply interested in questions of ontology, and especially as it is reflected in quantum physics, the 'measurement problem', and Relativity Theory's 4-dimensional spacetime, already extending and actually existing across all of space and time. Since I'm hardly ever going to publish scientific or philosophical papers about this, I instead incorporated my speculations about this in fiction. This has resulted in novels like Continuity Slip (written in the early 1990s as well) and the more recent Tomorrow's Yesterdays and Seeking Emily. Each of these novels represent a new step in the evolution of my thinking with regards to the deep questions I’m trying to pose and answer in a comprehensible manner. Not that I think I’ve succeeded, because I’m pretty confused about these things myself—as I should be. As everybody should be. J.B.S. Haldane’s dictum—’The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.’ —almost certainly holds true; even more so since we have to replace ‘universe’ by ‘multiverse’.
Every now and then I use global politics as a backdrop, such as in Body Leggers and its sequel Their Golden Blood—which are hybrids between a suspense novel, a romance and commentary on current global politics. There’s a thematic relationship to System Crash, which I wrote decades ago.
Right now I’m reevaluating other unfinished works from the late 20th century; the ones that didn’t make it because at the time I had no way to finish them. Sometimes that happens; you can’t find the deep theme and how to get through to the end. But years later, suddenly you see something that reveals the theme already there. BTW, that’s not ‘inspiration’ but a mix of the results of further thinking, changing and finally letting something bubble from what’s usually called the ‘subconscious’ to awareness. Nothing heebee-jeebee about it. In the process of revisiting old screenplays that never made it anywhere for example, I found quite a few that became short and medium-size novels.
STORYTELLER ETHICS
I agree with Harlan Ellison's dictum about taking your work seriously, not yourself; an admonition ignored by far too many. It took me decades to figure out that it's not about 'art', but just the simple, yet glorious, craft of entertaining people—and through this help them live their lives, because they can weave what they experience vicariously into their lives and thus may become stronger and more capable of coping with its vicissitudes. There’s a recent interesting article relating to this on Aeon.
Next to soldiering and prostitution, storytelling is probably one of the oldest and most venerable professions extant. There’s a good reason for that, which started off utilitarian, but now had become so much more. We kind of owe imaginative storytelling reverence and integrity; instead of using it to find glory, adulation, wealth or using it for issue-mongering. If we, by a streak of fortuity, happen to find that we can make a living with it along the way, so much the better. If we ignore integrity, we lose our way. Ironically—a bitter irony— that’s happed to the concept of ‘story’ itself. It’s been degraded to a fashion word; like labeling everything involving an exchange of ideas as a ‘conversation’ we undertake in the course of a ‘journey’ or whatever. Of course everything’s a story! And life is a journey. Through the multiverse actually. But not the kind of ‘journey’ people think it is…
Thing is, our brains and individuality are connected and unified by a process mirroring what we think of as stories or narratives. Same applies to collective/social ‘minds’. Actually it’s even more profound than that. It’s got to do with the multiverse and fundamental quantum ontology, but I’m going to leave that topic aside. Bottom line though: the current vapid use of ‘story’ and ‘storytelling’ for social, political or whatever other current weirdo Zeitgeist compulsions has leached out the word’s deep meaning at the human cognitive level. As so often, the word’s become a cliché without actual value. People just parrot it without ever thinking about its deep meaning and significance, if only because they hear everybody else doing the same. Think of it as a Zeitgeist pandemic of the mind.
PHOTOGRAPHY
I've been a photographer of sorts since my early teens, and the bug has never left me. My subjects over the years have ranged near and far. Literally. From close-ups to astronomy pictures, from lifeless buildings to living people. Cameras also varied. My transition from film to digital waited until decent digital cameras, and especially DSLRs, had become available. Right now photography as a part time business or something to focus on is on hold, but not dead.
Photography fascinates me because it captures unique, never-ever-again-to-occur-again instances in the history of the universe; which kind-of resonates with physicists like David Deutsch, who noted that:
“We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.”
Every time I take a picture that’s more than a ‘snap’, I think of that'; always astonished about how deeply a truth may be revealed to us through the simple action of capturing a static image. I mean, think of it… Suppose the multiverse is ‘real’—Actually, no need to suppose, because almost certainly is!—then when I take that picture, that frozen snap on the timeline of me, there are what’s known as a ‘countable infinity’ of other mes, who also take that shot, on their timeline. However the image they take will be different. Maybe indistinguishably so in many, though not all, of those alternative universes, even to fairly close investigation—not that that’s likely to be possible, because we’re not living in a Dr. Strange type multiverse; at least I think not—but different anyway.
OK, I admit it: I love being freaked out, with occasional sleepless nights as a result, by ideas that could do my head in but, at least as far as I can see, mercifully don’t. Just waiting to figure out another take on the multiverse concept and what it could mean to…well, everything really. The Infinity Library and the sequel to Emortal’s Quest, likely to be called Emortal’s Choice, are the most promising candidates for that.
FAVORITES
People:
My family (wife, daughters, grandchildren, son-in-law). Friends are good to have, but my family comes first. During the recent-to-current pandemic the overwhelming importance of human connections, not just for our sanity but for our very existence, has become clearer than ever before. The ideas explored in Tomorrow's Yesterdays and Seeking Emily have, at least for me, been very much shown to have substance.
Movies (a list subject to being updated every now and then):
Blade Runner (1982), Blade Runner 2048, Arrival, The Illusionist, Avatar, The Princess Bride, Stardust, The Duellists, The Next Three Days (US version of the far inferior French Pour Elle), The Adjustment Bureau, Hereafter, Howl’s Moving Castle, Serenity, Silverlinings Playbook, Mortal Engines, Wonder Woman, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit adaptations by Peter Jackson, Star Wars (Eps 4-6 and 7-8), most of the new Star Treks (the old ones, too, but they're rather dated), Once Upon a Time in the West (best spaghetti western ever), The Age of Adaline (best 'immortalist' romance ever), About Time (a whimsical, occasionally ethically troubling, but also heartwarming, film about love and family and choices; which doesn’t even know that it contains ‘multiverse’ ideas, but is loaded with them), Passengers (a movie with far more depth than it was given credit for). I also loved the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Lots of people hated it, but I found myself really liking its quirky and engaging genre-challenging approach.There’s also my favorite retiring-hitman flick, The Last Lullaby; much unrelated and just not known (streaming on Prime Video). Finally, leaving it for the last-but-not-least spot is that hidden little gem Safety Not Guaranteed; the kind of flick I wish I had made.
TV Series:
The incomparable Farscape at the top, followed by Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries and 2004-2009 series), Babylon 5, Picard, Firefly, Timeless, Longmire. Plus a couple of others that resonate with my current obsession about human-like intelligence in non-human robots, like Humans and Westworld (with my preferences going to Humans). I also confess that I rather like the TV adaptations of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of novels. The Netflix series La Casa de Papel (English: Money Heist) is a gem, too.
Books (fiction):
Picking at random a few from Jack Vance's work: The Dying Earth; the 'Lyonesse' and ‘Cadwal’ trilogies; Nightlamp. Stephen Gould’s Jumper. Philip Wylie’s forgotten far-aheadof-its-time classic The Disappearance. Terry England’s Rewind. Edmund Cooper’s The Uncertain Midnight (my favorite human-like robot love story). Ben Bova’s ‘Voyagers’ trilogy. Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. Steve Perry’s Spindoc and The Forever Drug. Dean Ing’s Systemic Shock, Single Combat, Wild Country trilogy. James Hall’s Bones of Coral. James Gunn’s The Magicians. Fred Saberhagen’s Emipre of the East. Sadly, there’s little in contemporary ‘literary’ sci-fi that really attracts me. I’d rather watch Star Wars, Star Trek and MARVEL flicks.
Books (non-fiction):
Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (my favorite translation is the one by Stephen Mitchell). Alan Harrington’s The Immortalist. David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. R.C. Solomon’s In Defense of Sentimentality. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Alfred Huang’s translation of the I Ching. Leonard Bishop’s Dare to be a Great Writer (though I have transgressed against a lot of his, usually valuable, counsel).
Writers (fiction):
Jack Vance. Period. The rest are trailing behind at a distance, even though I do like many of them. See fiction list above.
Composers:
Hans Zimmer, as well as many others from his ‘stable’. Jean Sibelius (especially when performed by any orchestra directed by Esa-Pekka Salonen). James Horner. Howard Shore. Rachmaninov. Tchaikovsky.
Instrumentalists:
The amazing Hilary Hahn and her violin.
Vocalists:
Females: Eva Cassidy. Dar Williams.
Males: Bob Seger. Bruce Springsteen.
Rock Groups:
Dire Straits.
Foo Fighters.
The most vexing questions:
What can ‘my’ possibly mean when I think of or refer to ‘my brain’?
If everything, past and future, already are and if the multiverse is real, then:
• who, when, where and how am I ?? (Or is it, ‘are we’?)
• what is ‘consciousness’, if it really is more than just a word?
• are our connections with others within the context of the multiverse really all about ‘convivial solipsism’?
Quotes:
"Love is supposed to be based on trust, and trust on love. It's something rare and beautiful when people can confide in each other without fearing what the other person will think."
E.A. Bucchianeri“Love fearlessly."
Omar Itani“Look back, but don’t stare."
From In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant“We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two.
We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'."
Arthur Eddington"Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible."
Doris Lessing“All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.”
David DeutschAnd finally, a quote by Carl Sagan, inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers from us when it captured an image of Earth, caught in the center of scattered light rays. It appears as a tiny point of light, only 0.12 pixel in size.
“Look […] at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
[…] There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”