Author David S. Michaels

I was born in 1957, the year Sputnik stunned the world and launched the Space Age. My dad was an aerospace manager with Hercules, a company that made solid fuel rocket motors. My mom was one of the world’s great moms when women generally put family above self-fulfillment. One of my earliest memories is of my dad coming home during John Glenn’s flight in early 1962. I asked my dad, “how fast the did rocket go, daddy? How high?” And he answered, “faster than a bullet, higher than the sky!”

I wasn’t a great student, probably because my mind was always drifting out beyond the asteroid belt. I went to school in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was something of an outsider.

In junior high I fell in with a small circle of like-minded outsiders, including Daniel Brenton, another big time space buff. As I progressed through high school, I had dreams of becoming an astronomer or an astronaut. One problem, though: I sucked at math. So I decided I would be a science fiction writer instead.

In the early ’70s, my folks split up and my mother, sisters and I moved to the California desert. The small college I attended had no classes on science fiction, so I took journalism. My professor recommended me for a job as a stringer for the local newspaper, The Indio Daily News. Soon, I’d worked myself up to edit a string of weeklies in Palm Desert. In 1985, I ran into a dark-eyed beauty of a female reporter who reminded me of Sigorney Weaver. Thus did I meet Margo, my eventual wife and mother of my three lovely daughters.

Around 1991, I began to feel like a burnout case after 10 years in journalism. So I launched a new career as a dealer in ancient Greek and Roman coins (another obsession of mine is ancient history). I also resurrected my dream of writing novels.