As a teenager, I fell in love with stories about great scientists and doctors who discovered germs and defined the germ theory of disease. I also became captivated by science fiction and years later, managed to meld the two in many of my writings. When I look over those stories and novels, with the exception of The Mars Virus novel, I find that many of them have a common theme: the betterment of the human condition. This betterment comes about through accidental good fortune mixed in with tossing rocks into still waters. There is also the occasion when I chide the human race for our preoccupation with sniping at one another, when in reality, as a species, we can be a whole lot of fun.
Admittedly, there is a certain amount of extremism in some of the stories. To my thinking, that represents the ultimate in idealism. A few of the the stories in this volume are based on personal experience (e.g. The Incubator, The fight at the Poker Game). Another (Entity) evolved from a single sentence that grabbed me when I read Stephen Crane's short story The Open Boat. Others followed the question: What would happen if? (Time Zone, The Magical Powers of Laszlo Pearce, Telepathy School) and still others are just silliness (Soap Opera, The Floozy). Finally, I included a collection of Jeffrey Shenero short stories, in keeping with my Shenero novels Toxic Exposure and Dying to Read. These stories include: The Incubator, The Mushroom Caves of Palau, Arena Games, and When the Devil Went to College.
As always, I hope the reader enjoys this varied assortment of tales as much as I enjoyed writing them.