About the Author

I was born in 1956, the son of a one-time minister in the Baptist church, amateur photographer, and civil servant. My mother had only ever been employed during World War Two (in the civil service) and was otherwise a housewife/widow bringing up her two sons in her father’s home on the English south coast. Her father, my grandfather, was a vehicle designer for BMC.

Space Race

I grew up in the era of the Apollo moon landings, off-road motorcycle sport, and the automation of production that would free the masses from the need for toil. That coming golden age of reason and leisure brought with it the imperative to demonstrate my right stuff to distinguish myself from the average person, who would be left behind. Women would choose men according to their ability to compete in the realms of sport, science, art, and literature, and the race would continue its evolution into proverbial sunny uplands populated by brave men and beautiful women.

Being the world’s worst mechanic and unable to afford a modern bike, I was fortunate to live beside a hill that, in a north-east wind, enabled me to teach myself hang gliding in 1974.

The December 1974 edition of Scientific American featured the Eagle III experimental hang glider on its front cover. (The image on the left is a later painting by me. It is not a link; that is as big as it gets.) It is hard to imagine nowadays, but in the summer of 1975 the British press and parliament debated whether hang gliding should be banned.

During the mid to late 1970s, I designed and built a series of experimental hang gliders. They all flew, but all were at least one step behind the state of the art — a lesson that there are plenty others in the world cleverer and braver than I. However, several were killed while pushing the boundaries of hang glider design.

Grounded

In 1979, after gaining a Higher National Diploma in computing, I joined a large defence contractor in Surrey. I would use the money I was going to make as a programmer to implement my postponed ambition to manufacture hang gliders. (That was the plan...) After sustaining a crushed vertebra in a hang glider crash in 1981, I took up parachuting the following year as a way of easing myself back to fitness and back into the air.

In 1985 the local arts centre hosted an exhibition of fifty of my paintings, nearly all featuring hang gliding. At left is my painting of a 1979 Ultralight Products Comet. (It is not a link; that is as big as it gets.)

In 1985, being unemployed and unable to run a car, I took up BMX racing, eventually competing a national level — albeit only at my two local tracks.

Living for the City

Half a year later, the government announced that government-run enterprises were inherently corrupt and inefficient. The problems of unemployment, state inefficiency, crime, the rising statistics of alcohol and other drug abuse, and 'the moral degeneration of our young people', were to be solved by self-employment. They set up a scheme to prepare the unemployed for going into business on their own account. Mechanical diggers, some with new yellow paint covering their original army olive drab, took over from Neil and his comrades the work at the city cemetery.

— from my as yet unpublished novel.

After my year as a self-sufficient entrepreneur (funded by the state Enterprise Allowance Scheme) ended, in June 1987 I was offered a programming job in the city of London. Unable to cope on her own, my mother suffered a semi-paralysing stroke. She never walked or spoke a whole sentence again.

Late on Sunday afternoon, while Sigma Major was still high above the horizon, he left his mother watching television in the communal dining room at the nursing home, cycled back to the house, packed his rucksack, and set out for the railway station, arriving at his room in East Central an hour before midnight, as usual.

(Sigma Major is the sun about which Neil's adopted home planet, Sigma7, orbits.)

Return to Flight Status

In January 1989 I went hang gliding again, after a five-year layoff, on a group expedition to Lanzarote. (Lanzarote is one of the Spanish Canary Islands, 60 miles off the west coast of Africa.) It was the first time I had been abroad.

As a computer programmer, graphic artist, and technical author, I saved enough money to start up my own business in 1991 creating and marketing aviation-related computer-based training programs.

The training chief of the air force told him over the telephone that the academic content of Aerodynamics and Propulsion was already adequately catered for by standard texts and classroom teaching, which might be inefficient but it was paid for by the state "So actually it costs nothing." He assured Neil, however, that the air force would buy many copies of his planned next program, Control and Stability, if it was of the same high standard. "Think of the cost saving to the air force in terms of flying training hours" the man said, "and at the same time how much profit you would make as a one-man enterprise. It’s a certain win-win situation."

Neil’s savings were almost exhausted. "I’ve got to sell the car," he said to his mother the following weekend. The glum mood she entered persuaded him to keep the car for the remainder of the year. Instead, he sold his hang glider.

In 1993, I created a hang gliding simulator rig using Microsoft Flight Simulator. For some reason, it caught the attention of the media more than real hang gliding, and certainly more than my aviation theory-teaching software, which failed to sell.

A Life Ends

In the fall of 1995, I went to see Apollo 13 with one of my hang gliding friends at a cinema in Bournemouth. Clips from the movie apeared on television when I watched it in my mother's room at the nursing home. I assured her that the full movie would be shown on telly soon, maybe as early as the following spring. She could see it then.

It was as if, for the second time in Neil’s life, he had passed through a star gate into a parallel universe. The blue of the sky, the yellows, browns, and greens of Sigma7’s land seemed perversely more vibrant than while his mother was alive. Passing a grocery store on his way home from the university and suddenly remembering with a sense of panic that he had run out of bread, he bought three loaves. Arriving home to a kitchen stacked with bread, he realised that the same imaginary running out of bread kept recurring.

In the summer of 2000 I was taught to fly paragliders in Dorset. I prefer hang gliding, but paragliders embody overwhelming practical advantages.

A Different Kind of Life

In October 2000, a new person — a new kind of person — entered my life. I continue to fly hang gliders and I bought my first mountain bike with suspension (front only) in 2007.

In 2009 I joined The Brights, an organisation dedicated to "illuminating and elevating the naturalistic worldview."