Speculative fiction allows an author to shatter the rules of real life narrative, much as animation permits a filmmaker's vision to escape the laws of physics--but if that fantastic narrative is not dedicated, at its core, to the telling of real human stories, it becomes an exercise in form without substance. I do my best to write stories about people as we are: lost and flawed, but good and noble too--set in the fields of imagination and future possibility. All that is to say that what I write is about something much more than rayguns and spaceships. I foresee futures for my characters that come from our world as it is now. That's a dark place for the most part, one in which lives are ground to dust by forces so huge they hardly bother to notice the people they crush--but it is also one beautiful and strange by turns, one in which those brave and clever and human enough to fight that darkness may yet find redemption at the end of their stories.