Chloe Zerwick

It has long been known to my family that if an unidentified spaceship lands in our backyard, they are not to stop me. "I'm going," I've told them, "and I'm taking the dog."

When my novel, "The Cassiopeia Affair" (written with Harrison Brown), was first published by Doubleday in 1968, it was way ahead of its time. It was even before Carl Sagan's "Contact." It tells the fictional story of the first message from another intelligence to be received on Earth and the effect this knowledge has on human events. Today, with the estimated 40 billion inhabitable planets in our galaxy alone and the many teams around the world currently using radioastronomy to search for evidence of life elsewhere, it is hardly rational to believe we are alone. Perhaps some of these beings are more advanced than we are and have found a way to live in peace together. As our fictional President Bradley says to the nation, "...that life fills the universe must make us view ourselves in a new and reverential way."

I was born in Cincinnati, grew up in several cites in the Midwest, and now live in Hudson, NY. I am a graduate of the University of Chicago where I learned how to think.