My dad, William Jones, passed away when I was a teenager. He loved Science Fiction. Paperback editions of Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert, Pohl, Bester and others were always lying around the house. The covers managed to be both exciting and cheesy at once: figures in silhouette caught in mysterious forcefields, semitransparent hands with eyes, gas clouds shaped like skulls. I remember picking up a first edition of Dune and reading the cover blurb. Sounded pretty interesting so I read the first paragraph. After that I was hooked. Thanks to Dad I had an early introduction into the world of science fiction. Faraway planets, missions to Saturn, wormholes, star troopers, mysterious aliens and civilizations: the seventies were a fantastic time to read SF. Men had just landed on the moon. What was next? It was fun to imagine new galaxies and the spaceships that traversed the void to reach them. Many things seemed possible, and those possibilities fired my imagination. And made me want to write.