I, too, want to finish Shard Songs. Next year, I’ll have more time!

I went back to your previous selection of protagonists for The Wind Harp and shed a few tears when I saw their faces again. Have you changed your choice for Serkadren? Everyone else appears to be the same.

We saw this vision in its infancy and hoped for a full blown epic. Shard Songs has been in my fondest memories for a long time and to see its possible publication is beyond my wildest dreams.

Bring on The Stone Lyre, it will probably have the usual haunted melody that all of your work contains. You know I am the avid consumer.

Kudos Erá’dhis

Indeed, the images of the actors/characters are excellent matches!

These actors/characters I show are not necessarily the only incarnations of my characters, but they happen to fit very well after the fact! The two are Jacqueline Kim (who played Lao Ma in Xena and Demora Sulu in Star Trek VII: Generations) and Rae Dawn Chong (whom I first noticed in Quest for Fire).

The faces you have for Antóa Tásri and Teg-Rav are very much as I imagined them–so that means your descriptions must have transferred their images well.

I’m glad you enjoyed The Biology of Star Trek! I did it small-to-large, from molecules to societies. You know me well enough by now to know it would be opinionated — and the opinions would not be standard fodder.

When you mention “rifts and time loops caused by stable black holes”, you do you mean stable traversable wormholes or actual black holes? The Starflight Handbook mentioned some sort of “black hole subway system”, but the concept was never made entirely clear to me. The idea seemed to be that plotting a precise trajectory toward the black hole could allow you to warp between widely separated points in seconds, hopefully without being stretched apart by tidal forces…

By the way, I recently finished your book, The Biology of Star Trek. It is more than just a “stealth science book”- your writing is far less bland than any of the other “science of (insert SF series here)” books! Your discussion of the Prime Directive and first contact between alien societies was particularly interesting to me, as were your discussions of the way Star Trek has portrayed various cultures. A lot of SF is about biology and culture, not about how a laser gun works, so The Biology of Star Trek covered some very important ground. The most appealing aspect of your book, however, is that you express your thoughts and opinions about all the subjects you cover, including those that tend to raise hackles. All in all, I found The Biology of Star Trek a very fun and surprisingly useful book!