Sean MacUisdin

I love science fiction. I grew up on the original Star Trek, original Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and Space 1999, then graduated to STNG, DS9, Red Dwarf, and finally to the new Battlestar Galactica. I was inspired to write military science fiction and vowed to give it the gritty slant that I often miss in popular science fiction. In the Navy, I sailed on many ships living in cramped quarters, often eating uninspired food and working long hours. My series of books, Europa Rising, Jupiter Rising, and the upcoming Titan Rising, focus on the difficulties and often unpleasantness of living and operating in space where it takes weeks and months to go from mission to mission and not the hours and days of popular science fiction. It is the challenge of operating on one's own and without support and with communications that can take hours that I find interesting; it seems to hearken back almost to the age of sail.

I also love westerns. This perhaps leads me back to my frontier fantasy; that fleeting existence on the very edge of the wilds where danger and a frightening darkness lurk. This is a world of my imagination - of safety in a civilization surrounded by an ocean of the wild unknown. This is also the world of my second series, The Scarlet Bastards. Set in an inhospitable colony twenty light years from Earth, it is the memoir of a young runaway who joins a United Nations chartered army of the downtrodden and poor for service off-world. It is an existence on the back of a tundra camel fighting gangs and war lords and thanking each day's sunset for yet another day of survival and hating it for another chance of death the following dawn.