My first collaboration with Doug Beason started out as a lark. I was working as a technical writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where Doug had come to spend the summer as a visiting physicist. Up to that point, I’d had a few minor short stories published, as had Doug, but neither of us had broken into any professional sales. Being two aspiring science fiction writers in the same workplace, it was a natural for us to meet.
We knocked around a few ideas and decided to write this story just when Doug was recalled to Albuquerque, where he was stationed in the US Air Force. We sent partially completed drafts of the story back and forth through the mail (long before the days of compatible computer systems, so that each of us had to rekey the other’s pages whenever they arrived in the mail).
Our second story, published in Amazing Stories, was the springboard for our novel Lifeline, which led to a three-book contract with Bantam. Since then, we have written nine novels together, including most recently Critical Mass, a high-tech thriller about the nuclear power industry.