About
I earned my A.B in Physics from Harvard/Radcliffe in 1963, and my PhD in Geophysics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1970. As my dissertation was on ice fog (which isn't found just anywhere) I stayed at the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute until I retired in 1998. (Yes, it was an early retirement, but I was having vision problems at the time and could not drive to work reliably.) I still live in Alaska, in a suburb of Fairbanks called North Pole.
I'd written quite a lot in my years at UAF, not only professional papers, but science popularizations and articles on canine history. On retirement, I added considerably to my websites on Shetland Sheepdogs and genetics, and began playing with fiction. I've also kept up my interest in gardening (at least in summer!) I'm also into animals, snowflakes and space. (I taught a beginning astronomy class a few times.) In addition to Homecoming, I've written a sequel as well as a trilogy set a couple of hundred years later but in the same universe and with some of the same characters. The sequel, Tourist Trap, won first place in science fiction and best fiction book in the Reader Views contest. Both books have five-star reviews from ForeWord Clarion.
Description
<p><span><span>Shakespeare's Witches tell Banquo, "Thou Shalt 'Get Kings Though Thou Be None". Though Banquo is murdered, his son Fleance gets away. What happened to Fleance? What Kings? As Shakespeare's audience apparently knew, Banquo was the ancestor of the royal Stewart line. But the road to kingship had a most inauspicious beginning, and we follow Fleance into exile and death, bestowing the Witches' prophecy on his illegitimate son Walter. Born in Wales and raised in disgrace, Walter's efforts to understand Banquo's murder and honor his lineage take him on a long and treacherous journey through England and France before facing his destiny in Scotland.</span></span></p>
Story Behind The Book
Homecoming and Tourist Trap covered the early life of Roi Laian, and the trilogy I'm working on will be about 8 years of his life as an adult, coping with a war with one of his favorite planets, Horizon. This story gives a bit of what happened to Timi and Amber after Tourist Trap, and Roi's first interaction with Horizon--which turned out to have a major impact on the culture a couple of centuries later.
