About "Winters Are Hard"

Winters Are Hard goes up over at Book View Cafe today.

WAH appeared on scifi.com in 2002. It stayed up there for a long time-- long after the branch of the SciFi Channel quit publishing original literate science fiction. It's nice to have it hosted again.

I'd been working on a future history (the file is called "The Howard Cycle") for a long time.

Yeah, I know. What can I say? I grew up reading Heinlein. For all his faults Heinlein was one of the first popular SF writers that wrote within a framework that existed outside the published work. Nowadays, that's common.

I'm convinced that technology gets most interesting is when the line is blurs between what is human and what is human technology. That's part of WAH and, not surprisingly, a center piece of of the Howard Cycle.

Of course, I wrote WAH before Apples iPod and iPhone. Consequently, my idea of humans blurring the line between themselves and technology involved surgical changes. The way people interact with technology now suggests that the line can be washed away without messy medical procedures.

WAH was the first story of mine that was placed firmly in the Howard Cycle. It hasn't been the last.