I grew up reading Golden Age sci-fi, the classics, and all kinds of weird stuff my rather strange mother left lying around. I'm still an eclectic reader but now I'm also a writer of very serious (but action-packed) sci-fi. My influences are hard for me to fathom because I have read so much, but if you ask me which are my writing heroes, I could rattle off a few names like Ursula le Guin (who writes so well and is scarily intelligent), Kurt Vonnegut (who felt all the pain of being here but, somehow, didn't despair until the very end), Ray Bradbury (whose "Martian Chronicles" first showed me what sci-fi could really do), J.G. Ballard (whose prose is as near to poetry as it reasonably can be), Harry Harrison (another revelation: sci-fi could be laugh-out-loud funny), Greg Egan (another scary intellect with very cool ideas), Sherri Tepper (whose work is so lyrical that reading becomes indistinguishable from dreaming), oh and so many more! Asimov, of course, Heinlein, of course, and all those guys whose names start with B (Benford, Brin, Bova, Baxter, Bear, etc.). Jeez, there's so much great sci-fi out there that I have to just stop or I'd name scores of writers. H. G. Wells, for God's sake! Alastair Reynolds, Douglas Adams, Brian Aldiss, Philip Jose Farmer, Kim Stanley Robinson, Paul McAulay, Aldous Huxley - Somebody stop me! I re-read the complete works of John Wyndham a few years ago and I thought, "Oh my God, I write just like him!" See how I flatter myself? I should be so lucky. If I could write half as well as any of the writers I've already named, I would be in Heaven. Anyway, don't get me started on Edna O'Brien or Daphne du Maurier, or a thousand other non-sci-fi writers I love, or we'll be here all night.

I've been commercially published - three of my novels are available from a Pan Macmillan imprint - but I self-published all my other books and I'll probably stick with that way of doing things. I've won a couple of writing prizes and I've twice been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award (the premier Australian sci-fi award). I've also had about 20 short stories published in magazines and anthologies.