I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the winter of 1964. I moved with my family to the suburbs of Perth, the remotest city on the planet where I discovered the joys of dreaming about far-off places at an early age. When I was five I watched the moon landing on a small boxy television that only showed pictures in flickery black and white, and knew by the age I was seven that I was going to grow up, become a geologist and live on Mars.

Something went horribly wrong, though. Although I read more and more about the future, discovering adventures that told of spaceships cutting through the darkest depths of space, and of the glittering, magical empires that were found at journey’s end, the real journey to space happened in fits and starts, and then seemed to peter out and die.

That was where The Starry Rift was born. I’ve loved tales of distant tomorrows and far futures, but increasingly they seemed out of step with the world I was living in. Then, one day, I asked myself this question - I was born in 1964, some of the people who wrote the stories I was reading were born before electricity ran down their street, and at least one even travelled out West in a covered wagon with his family! As good as those stories were, how could they possibly talk to someone who had been born in 1995! I couldn’t see it, and so I set out to put together the first in what I hope is a series of books bringing the very best, cutting edge writers of our time to readers who are the same age now as I was when I was voyaging to imaginary futures.

The book has had a long, slow voyage to readers. From that idea, that spark, it went to first a publisher, and then a handful of wonderful authors. I worked on it, in amongst other projects, for close to four years. It took that long to get the stories together, line up publishing schedules and finally get it out to readers. I only hope it talks to readers the way I imagined that it might.