UtenteChriskander

Library has most of my acquisitions from the past 53 years – yep, it’s threatening to get away from me.
The earliest works are Science fiction from the fifties – Asimov, Heinlein, Bester, and others. Except for some really old stuff that came from my parents, like a school atlas from around 1910 that was my mother’s, some patriotic stuff like “Queen Alexandra’s Christmas Gift Book” filled with royal snapshots that must have been a gift to Mother, and a family bible with covers of ‘real’ cedar of Lebanon. I also have a few I’ve collected, like an infantry officers’ Field Handbook, 1914 edition, and “Achievements in Engineering” dated 1891 that tell about things that are lost in the mists of time in our world. I also have a 1950 set of Encyclopedia Britannica that are far more useful for historical facts than the current editions.

I have quite a collection of war histories and illustrated books of military and technological interest. For many years I picked up a good percentage of the books written about WWI and WWII, until I felt I had a reasonable grounding in the events that shaped my family history. Another category would be nautical history from marine archaeology to detailed works like “Nelson’s Ships’.

Then there are the classics and modern writers that one ‘must’ read – especially if one has aspirations about becoming an author oneself. I’d lump them with the ‘how to’ handbooks ranging from Strunk and White to “Editing Canadian English”, via an eclectic selection of dictionaries – of English as well as etymology, philosophy, science and most things in between.

Not finished yet. In the eighties I met the writers who brought together Science and Eastern Philosophy – Capra, Zukav, etc. From that period I have several copies of the Tao te Ching, Buddhist texts, Upanishads, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, John Hick, Bertrand Russell, and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.

What else? A bunch of Computer books, from obsolete works on machine language and DOS Handbooks (still used when I need to use GPS software from the nineties), and programming in c, which I gave up to spend more time writing fiction. Then there is the growing collection of novels I’ve had some input into – either in the critiquing of early drafts of seeing into print – all from online writing friends. My own collection is currently one novel, but three more are under contract.

I’m sure I can find more, but you must be nodding off by now.

I’m a retired surveyor who has worked in the oil provinces of Canada, the Canadian Arctic and the Libyan desert. Spent other oil industry stints as an operator in a refinery and in a sour gas plant. I’ve also surveyed on a heavy construction project, a dam, where I was a member of the tunneling survey crew and then the check surveyor for the main dam construction.

I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, with my wife and two Humane Society shelter dogs. I was born in London, England, just a couple of months before the Second World War started and became a Canadian Citizen in 1975. I walk the dogs (well, actually they run,) every morning, rain, shine, or blizzard – they get an hour to an hour and a half, and I get the needed exercise.

I now write fiction full time. I have two novels accepted by Double Dragon with the first slated for June 2007 – and now I have the fantasy novel accepted by Zumaya. I also have a 9000 word short in the new DDP anthology Twisted Tails II (vol 2). My DDP novels are soft SF, with a small group of moderns marooned on an alternate Earth circa 1700 – political and military adventures with swordfights, sailing ships, and cavalry action. My Zumaya title is a fantasy novel that has a young prince taking on dangerous magic to become the sorcerer king – and his sweetheart taking action against the circumstance that says they cannot marry. It also features an arrogant antagonist who pits his materialist technology against magic and the human spirit.