I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, lived in this area, off and on, most of my life. Bay Village has become a western suburb of Cleveland. This house is a former vacation cottage almost on the edge of Lake Erie. While my novel "The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death" begins with a scene in San Francisco, it is largely set in Cleveland. It is an apt location. Cleveland, due to an error by the first surveying party sent here, was laid out in the wrong location. In popular local nomenclature it is sometimes called, "The Mistake by the Lake."

It's my mother's house. She bought it in the 1950's when there were still wild woods in the back. Circa 1954, she saw a UFO out the back window. A bright object descended slowly, appeared to touch the ground, paused, and then ascended slowly and out from view of the window. When she got up enough courage to go out and look, there was a circular impression in the grass in a tiny clearing in the woods. It had not been an optical illusion. The estimated exact spot is now apparently paved over as a driveway. I have lived here steadily, but off and on, since the 1970s.

Alas, only "The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death" has a couple scenes in the San Francisco area. Two of my characters in my short story "In Less Than One-Fiftieth of the Time" in my book "Open 25 Hours" graduated from Stanford and UC Berkeley, respectively. But most of the story takes place in the Washington DC area.

It's a long story, so forgive me. I was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. I got a couple weeks leave and went down to San Francisco over the Christmas-New Year 1961-62 and liked it. When I got shipped back from S.E. Asia, the plane landed at Travis AFB. And I got there again for a couple days. In '64, I bought a car, ended up in San Jose. After a lot of poverty-related misery, I got a minimum wage job measuring nuclear particle tracks at Stanford. My boss, Martin Perl, would years later win a Nobel Prize for discovering the tau particle. I eventually got married, and stayed on in the San Francisco until '68. With free tickets as a result of my cleaning airplanes at Pan American, we went to London, Denmark, India, Hong Kong, and stayed in Japan for almost three years. That's where I began writing, suffering under the delusion that I might sell short stories in America like Lafcadio Hearn did when he lived in Japan.

After almost three years there, my employee tickets were no good, so I got a "waiver" and worked my way back from Yokohama to California on a C-3 freighter as a wiper. My wife shipped our dogs to my father. She came by plane. We borrowed a car and drove to the Clarion Writers Workshop in Science Fiction and Fantasy, the last one held on the Clarion campus. I found I could get the GI Bill and puttered at getting an A.A. at a local community college. We drove the car back to California in late '72. The guy no longer wanted it. It was just as well. It broke down shortly after.

Poverty and other pressures led to a dumb and regretted divorce. I went back to Asia on a project to find out what happened to kids of G.I.s who grew up in Asia. When I got back to California, I went to school at Berkeley.

After that, I came back here, got a job at Case-Western Reserve University. That gave me a free course each semester. I took grad courses in writing. The prof said try to get a t.a. somewhere. I mailed out lots of apps. Then I went back out to San Francisco, got a temp job testing mayonnaise in the lab at Best Foods, was lucky to get both Ohio and California unemployment compensation, one after the other, and a free room for desk clerking at an old hotel in Berkeley. So I lived there for a year and researched the California Gold Rush era. But that was the last that I lived in the San Francisco area.

I got a possible t.a. at Central Washington U., but only after the volcano blew its top did I really get it for certain. When I arrived on the campus, it was covered with gray volcanic ash. My very short and not fictional story "Night Fright and Morning Melancholy" was written there. Several years later, that experience led to me getting a job in Germany, where I wrote two short stories now in my book "Open 25 Hours."

As above, I was living in Tokyo in 1968. I was broke. My visa did not allow me to work. So I delusionally thought that I could get a tiny income by writing science fiction stories. I got hold of a cheap half-broke Hermes portable typewriter and began writing. Xerox machines had only come out, and there was only one available, and it cost the equivalent of 25-cents per page. So a lot of those stories had to be sent off as originals, and were never returned. I included International Postal Payment Certificates and return envelopes, but staffs at small science fiction magazines seem not to know how they worked. Anyway, none ever were returned. And more of the stories were lost when the janitor cleaned off a desk at a college publication a couple years later.

As a result, only two of over a dozen from that era survive, and one was only started there and completed at the Clarion Writers Workshop, "The Man in the Sake Flask in the Black Attaché Case." The other, my short science fiction novel "Norikaeru," survived because I made a carbon copy on pages sometimes cut to typing-paper size from brown paper bags and with only two sheets of carbon paper. It was almost illegible, but I knew my own story and retyped it.

That story was originally intended to illuminate a new cosmology-of-sorts that struck me while I was waiting on a platform at, as I now recall, Nakano Sakaue Subway station, watching two trains on different tracks accelerate at slightly different rates in the same direction. Why couldn't the Big Bang be an infinite number of "universes" accelerating at ever so slightly different rates out of the singularity, eventually to implode back in and start all over? Since each of these "universes" explodes at a different rate, the physical properties and laws governing them would be slightly different. They would pass right through each other with near-zero probability of any detection. They would effectively be different dimensions. "Norikaeru" means "to transfer," as like across dimensions.

As above, I thought that I had a bunch of bright creative scientific ideas. Even if I could not write like a professional, I thought that the idea material might carry sufficient weight to get readers. I had, by then, worked in minimum-wage jobs in several science-related labs. If I did not know science very well, I knew the lingo and could visualize scenes and characters. Also, science fiction has become an almost liturgical language of the predominant belief-system of our times. Even firm believers may have doubts about miracles and other more unreal things in traditional religious texts, but virtually everyone believes in E=mc2 and the like. So science fiction would appear to be compiling a story-base for some yet-to-be-completely-written religious text in the future.

The beautiful thing about science fiction is that there seem to be no real standards. Science fiction adapts to social change, new technology, creative scientific theory and makes up its own temporary standards as it goes along. If someone has some good idea-material, it is totally open to him or her. Science fiction writers grasp dangers, warn us, and sometimes may prevent ugly futures by opening discussion while there is still time. But sometimes reality overwhelms even that capacity. If Franz Kafka, in 1931, had written of the Nazi horrors and the Holocaust, readers would have said that the story was too far out and unreal, even for Kafka. And note that even today, with evidence all around, we still have people denying that it ever happened. The lesson is that science fiction writers should not hold back, even if it all seems too outrageous. Reality may prove that it was not. "The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death" is just the opposite. It strives to give us confidence about the near future. In spite of the bizarre and grubby in their recent pasts, the two main characters and the minor characters in the story's future segments are wonderfully and reassuringly "normal." I just went where the muse led me.

I began with no firm standards except a science fiction writer's desire for foretelling, and I went where the muse led me in "The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death." In that, it was a little different than two of my other novels now up on the iUniverse site. I began "Norikaeru" with an idea of illuminating my invented cosmology-of-sorts and poking fun at absurdities in the Kennedy assassination explanations and pointing out how the establishment of the patent and copyright offices in the Constitution may have accelerated a human oriented invention and human use of technology. I began "Sinking Into Summer's Arms" to warn of a possibility of global warming precipitating a new Ice Age, to show that Neanderthals were not a whole lot different than us, and to illuminate the disturbing disparity between advanced and backward in our present state of civilization. I think that science fiction should keep itself as free of standards as possible.

After I finish a story, I look at it. And I am amazed. Sometimes I write with two or more conscious themes in mind. But even then, more ideas seem to enter as I go along. Sometimes it feels like I am only some kind of super-computer being used by something else out there to write a story. It seems to write itself.

Things accumulated in my mind. Not much attention is given to the fact that everything on our planet seems to require sleep even though it is counter-survival, for animals at least, to do so because they are in an absolutely helpless state. And all mammals and maybe all animals appear to dream in such a way that learning and experience are integrated into the larger animal socio-psychological being. It is almost as if we and all life might go back each night to a state of connection with the thin layer of biosphere that makes our planet so different from other big barren rocks hurtling through the vast silence of space.

And I wanted to do for porno models what writers and artists in the past, like the Japanese Ukiyo-e printmakers, for instance, did for prostitutes, namely humanize them. Then a snake got into the house while I was taking a shower, and a molecule of an idea for an Adam and Eve story began to replicate. Like Owen, I had a job putting medical specimens in transparent plastic blocks. It seemed as if plastic would be a fine example of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. On one hand, it is the very metaphor of sleaze and cheapness. On the other, it is a vital part of our level of civilization, from spacecraft parts to artificial organs. I had my Adam character tempt my Eve character with it to point out changed attitudes toward gender and how the old story unnecessarily put women down for millennia. And their progeny is not a couple macho guys who get into a murderous squabble, but a very pleasant young woman who chooses to study healing arts. Thus the world that may spring from that kind of Adam and Eve may be a better one.

I got into self-publishing because I was nervous. I had, while researching to turn Mary Shelley's lesser-known novel "The Last Man" into a modern screenplay several years earlier, accidentally come across a smallpox epidemic that wiped out the Bronze Age at about the time of the Exodus and the Fall of Troy. I had hastily written this into a book titled "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age." And then I began sending it around, both to scholars and to publishers. I got nervous that someone with a whole string of proper credentials would publish the idea before I did. And then someone told me about iUniverse.com. I sent them two novels before I sent them my book on the end of the Bronze Age, mostly to see what problems there might be from their new print-on-demand publishing technology. First I sent "Sinking Into Summer's Arms" in Word Perfect. Their system was not set up for it back then, and all my automatic soft page breaks came up as section breaks in the proofs. Because of that, I did not have the energy to proofread the book as well as I should have. There are one or two typos. Then I sent "The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death" in MS Word. That worked okay. So then I sent "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age." Then a manager of a student computer lab got some of my old stories written in Wordstar and MacWrite into Word. So I sent "Open 25 Hours," and "Norikaeru," and "End of the Road." By then, I was addicted. I rummaged through things and found a couple other nonfiction manuscripts to send them. I still have a couple novels, but both are pretty lousy and highly experimental. I'll have to rewrite them. But I may send them to iUniverse, too. Anyway, that's how all those books got self-published.

I am working on something. But it might interfere with it to give it out just now. And I would like to have the freedom to drop it if it does not seem to pan out, which I might not be able to do if people out there expect something. So, I'll just putter with it for a few more months. There is still one more book in preparation at iUniverse, a collection of my essays titled "Preshrunk Ponderings and Rumpled Rememberings." I'll have to proof it, yet. That will make eight books effectively self-published by them.

There is, I have to say, another author named Tom Slattery. That Tom Slattery co-authored "Civilization Through Tools." That book comes up on Amazon, Borders, and other sites. I do not know who he is. But the two of us could easily get mixed up because we seem to have both written nonfiction popular history books. His "Civilization Through Tools" would seem to have a vague similarity to my "The Tragic End of the Bronze Age."

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© Tom Slattery 2005 Republished with permission by Karisable.com