Steven L. Thompson

Born in 1948 into an Air Force pilot’s family, I served in the USAF myself during the Vietnam War, and was imbued thereby, willy-nilly, with a worldview and life experiences much different from those of most non-military people. As a high-school kid I thought I wanted to be an astrophysicist, and got early acceptance and a scholarship to study astronomy at Berkeley, but after a while, curiosity got the better of me after I wondered what historians thought they knew and why they thought they knew it, and finally got a B.A. in History with High Honors. Started road-racing motorcycles in 1967 while at Berkeley, and continued while in uniform, in Texas and the UK, finally retiring from racing in 1988. Also trained as a pilot, and enjoyed flying an interesting variety of aircraft, from Cessnas to warbirds. As an inveterate gearhead with a voracious appetite for powered experiences, I (mostly) sated that with senior editorial positions at Autoweek, Road Test, Car and Driver, Cycle Guide, and AOPA Pilot. The aggregate of this life trajectory shaped my approach to writing novels, the first of which was published in 1980. I didn’t set out to be a writer, but as a lifetime eclectic reader, it seemed to come naturally. Books were my constant companions and their authors my teachers, so it is they who most profoundly affected what I’ve done and why I did it, from seeking adventure on wheels and wings to writing my own books. My purpose in writing has accordingly always been, among other things, to illuminate the many ways powered, personal mobility has transformed our lives, individually and collectively. We lose sight of these too often in the daily busy-ness and our immersion in a world utterly unlike that of our forebears whose only means of travel was by foot, animal-drawn vehicle, and afloat on a boat or ship. Born about half a century after what I call the Automotive Transformation, by sheer luck of birthdate and place, I and most if not all my fellow Americans have been swept along in wave after wave of that transformation, so that by the second decade of the 21st century, people obviously take its effects for granted. The transformation has not been without serious and devastating social, cultural, and environmental costs, and those too are crucial to my writing, in fiction and nonfiction. Nevertheless, the demands of good storytelling have always been uppermost in my approach to writing anything, and it's my hope my readers have enjoyed and continue to enjoy "the ride!"