It’s a Chinese proverb – I think – that says you should beware what you wish for, because your wishes might come true.

Well, it’s right.
And I’ll talk about my personal matters for a while, if you don’t mind.

Ever since I was ten or thereabouts, I wanted to be a scientist and a writer.
Both things – I never saw a contradiction in being a scientist, a geologist, a paleontologist, and at the same time being a writer of fiction.
Some did, like the colleague in Turin University that asked me, in a rather chilly tone, how could I hope to be taken seriously as a scientist if I also wrote fantasy stories¹.

And talking about writers, it’s a well documented fact that I have a passion for those old hacks of the pulp era – Walter B. Gibson, Norvell Page, Lester Dent.
Howard, Lovecraft and Smith.
Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett.
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
This is not an exclusive, of course – there’s a lot of earlier and later authors that I love, but the pulpsters always had a special spot in my heart (wherever that happens to be).
The idea of a lone writer, sitting at his desk, hammering out stories at breakneck pace to pay the bills while outside of his window the Great Depression rages on always fascinated me.

And indeed, it sounds exciting, when it’s happening to others. Continue reading →