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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

In July, 1969, I was a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant preparing for deployment to Westpac as a search and rescue pilot with HC-1. I was completing transition from the H-2, a smaller helicopter, to the Sikorski H-3, which was better suited to the high density altitudes of Southeast Asia. Surprisingly, in retrospect, even though I was a pilot and an avid SF reader, with the intensity of the retraining, I hadn’t paid much more than cursory attention to the Apollo 11 mission and didn’t realize the full extent of the media coverage until I returned home from the base late that afternoon, when my then-wife reminded me of what was happening. When the time drew closer to touchdown, we woke our son, then only two years old, and plunked him down with us in front of the television with the statement that he should see this historic moment, even if he might not remember it.

I did swallow hard when Armstrong actually stepped onto the moon, but the impact of that moment became far greater over time, especially once I ended up as a political staffer in Washington, D.C., and watched the politicians continue to gut the space program year after year. That contrast between the focused aspirations and technical excellence of the Apollo program and political “reality” brought home in a continuing and gut-wrenching way how far removed politics can be from the best of human achievement, and that understanding, I think, is reflected in most of the books I’ve written.


L.E. Modesitt, Jr. is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He has penned dozens of novels, but is perhaps best known for his Saga of Recluce series.

About the Author

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L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Author

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., is the author of more than 80 novels – primarily science fiction and fantasy, including the long-running, best-selling Saga of Recluce, the Imager Portfolio, and The Grand Illusion, as well as nearly 50 short stories, and numerous technical and economic articles. His novels have included ten national bestsellers and have sold millions of copies in the U.S. and world-wide, and have been translated into German, Polish, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Bulgarian, French, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Swedish. He has been a delivery boy; a lifeguard; an unpaid radio disc jockey; a U.S. Navy pilot; a market research analyst; a real estate agent; director of research for a political campaign; legislative assistant and staff director for U.S. Congressmen; Director of Legislation and Congressional Relations for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; a consultant on environmental, regulatory, and communications issues; a college lecturer and writer in residence; and unpaid treasurer of a civic music arts association. Shortly after his tours as a Navy amphibious officer and then as a search and rescue pilot, he returned to Denver as a market research analyst and economist, which experiences generated the idea for his first published story – “The Great American Economy” – printed in ANALOG in 1973. He then pursued a career in another kind of fantasy by becoming the Legislative Assistant for Congressman Bill Armstrong in Washington, D.C., and later staff director for Congressman Ken Kramer. During his years in Washington, he attempted to regain some hold on reality by writing increasingly more science fiction. Not totally by coincidence, his first novel was published while he was serving as the head of Legislation and Congressional Relations at the U.S. EPA during the Reagan-Burford controversies. There he was responsible for coordinating EPA’s response to Congressional inquiries and hearings and for accepting midnight telephone calls from various individuals terming themselves journalists. This experience led to the writing of The Green Progression, a book almost totally factual and yet termed more fantastic than any of his fantasy novels. Along the way, Mr. Modesitt has weathered eight children, a fondness for three-piece suits [which has deteriorated into a love of vests], a brown Labrador, a white cockapoo, an energetic Shih-tzu, five scheming dachshunds, a capricious spaniel, a sweetly crazy Aussie-Saluki, and various assorted pet rodents. Finally, in 1989, to escape nearly twenty years of occupational captivity in Washington, D.C., he moved to New Hampshire. There he married a lyric soprano, and he and his wife Carol moved to Cedar City, Utah, in 1993, where she directs the voice and opera program at Southern Utah University and he continues to create and manage chaos, largely but not entirely of the fictional type.
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