Behind the Fiction

Every writer is asked the same question.

"Where do your ideas come from?"

The truthful answer is that I don't really know.

Some arrive from history. Others from science. Many begin with a single question that refuses to leave me alone.

But a surprising number began much earlier.

Throughout my life, I have occasionally witnessed things I have never been able to explain.

As a child, I remember seeing people who appeared to be there one moment and gone the next.

I've watched lights crossing the night sky that behaved unlike satellites.

I've seen strange lights high in a clear blue sky that appeared to be leaving the Earth's atmosphere.

I once stood on a railway platform as a steam train seemed to arrive with all the familiar sounds of engines and wheels... yet nothing emerged from the tunnel.

Years later, standing alone on a beach at night, I watched a single red light moving across rough water at impossible speed. There was no engine noise. No wake. No silhouette against the waves. Just the light, travelling silently before disappearing into the darkness.

Were these extraordinary events?

Perhaps.

Were they misunderstandings?

That is equally possible.

After all these years, I still don't know.

What I do know is that they left me with questions.

Science fiction begins where certainty ends.

It asks, "What if?"

What if there is an explanation we simply haven't discovered yet?

What if our understanding of reality is incomplete?

What if the impossible is simply something waiting to be understood?

I have never written my novels to convince anyone that unusual experiences have extraordinary explanations.

I write them because I believe curiosity is one of humanity's greatest strengths.

Every scientific discovery begins with someone willing to question what everyone else accepts.

Perhaps the answer is entirely ordinary.

Perhaps it is not.

Either way... the question is always worth asking.