I’ve always enjoyed science fiction. After discovering Heinlein in the Mesa High School library as a teenager, I spent the next couple decades reading nothing but the great speculative authors. Some I liked – Heinlein, Niven, Pournelle, Farmer, Haldeman, Asimov, Pohl, Resnick, so on – and some I didn’t care for (such as Ray Bradbury and Pohl Anderson, but I won’t dwell on them because they do have so many fans).

And when I felt the time was right to try my own hand at a little science fiction, I went with Hubbard’s idea of keeping the science secondary to the characters in order to tell a story about people, instead of droning on about possible new breakthroughs in science and technology.

My short story Gold For Lily Dale is about the unusual situation two independent asteroid belt miners, owners of the PMV Lily Dale, find themselves in when they have to make the hard choice between something ordinarily rare and something ordinarily common.