About the author

S E Mulholland

<p>I started writing fiction as a way to procrastinate working on my dissertation.&#160; A PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics isn&#8217;t a bad place to start when you&#8217;re building a science fiction universe &#8211; if nothing else, you learn to deal with your readers demanding a certain level of scientific rigor. But a universe is a big place; no one person knows enough to get the details right for all of it. I fell back on what had been drummed into me at University: check your work; get peer review.&#160;</p>&#13; &#13; <p>That is, I hit up friends and acquaintances (and the occasional bemused docent), with expertise both academic and practical, and asked them to check my work.&#160; Often these discussions went beyond mere technical correction, opening whole new avenues of exploration by sharing insights only available after years or decades spent down very particular rabbit holes.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>I&#8217;m especially interested in the role of time.&#160; The sorts of big events you find in SF novels tend to play out on timescales of decades, centuries, or even millennia. &#160;&#160;This is something we can see in our own history: the effects of conquest and colonisation (European, Arab, Greek, Persian, Mongol, etc.) are still playing out, all around the globe, centuries later.</p>&#13; &#13; <p>New Zealand, where I live, is on the edge of the map, the last habitable place on earth to be colonised by humans. From this periphery I look up and out, imagining a possible future of exploration and colonisation where distance is measured in light years and the travel time is measured in centuries.</p>