I started writing fiction as a way to procrastinate working on my dissertation.  A PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics isn’t a bad place to start when you’re building a science fiction universe – 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. 

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.  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.

I’m especially interested in the role of time.  The sorts of big events you find in SF novels tend to play out on timescales of decades, centuries, or even millennia.   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.

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.