I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.
The Lord of the Rings movie set an entirely new standard for fantasy in the movies.
When I was in college, I spent a summer working in London. I'd enjoyed tea before that, but then I got actual, really good tea there and never looked back.
Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.
So, one of the things I was doing with the aliens in The Quiet Invasion was creating that advanced society which had ideas about morality and proper use of natural resources that were radically different from ours, as the Europeans were from the American Indians.
