Sam Lippert

Before we start the biography, you can go to About.me/samlippert (sorry, Amazon won't allow active hyperlinks here) to learn about me, get links to all of my social media accounts and much more!

I grew up reading Robert A. Heinlein, and like him, I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Mine is from MIT though, not Annapolis! Something he was famous for saying was "A writer writes to make money." Everything he wrote had the primary purpose of generating an income, and because of this, upon his death, extremely little of what he had written was unpublished.

Until very recently the challenge for any writer was to meet the "standards" of the publishing industry in order to begin to receive any income from their work. Often this took many, many years of painstaking work honing their craft, before ever receiving compensation. Think about your profession, would you be doing it if you had to spend years working at it with no pay before ever receiving and income?

The advent of e-readers and print-on-demand publishing has changed this. Now authors can hone their craft, while receiving some small amount of income! Will all of these offerings be good? No. Will many of them ever become bestsellers? Definitely not. Will some of these authors go on to write great things? Most likely. In many ways there has been no better time in history to be an author. Except maybe, if you were a science fiction author, the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In the mid-point of the last century the public, especially teen and "tween" boys were starving for this arguably "new" form of fiction. Dozens of magazines sprang into being which specialized in short to medium length stories in this genre. In order to keep printing costs low and retail prices cheap, they were printed on inexpensive "pulp" paper, and became known as "the pulps."

Most of the stories were exciting adventure stories of questionable literary quality, but it was from this arena that eventually birthed the "greats" (Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, etc...) This was the "childhood" of the science fiction. (The classic science fiction "B" movies derived directly from this.)

As with everything, Science Fiction eventually "grew up," became a respectable literary form and, in my opinion, began to take itself FAR too seriously. My first published work The Nathan Daniels Saga: Part 1 is meant to buck that trend, in the spirit of the early pulps.

I hope you enjoy it.