Martyn Rhys Vaughan

Martyn Vaughan was fascinated with tales of other worlds and other modes of being from a very early age. One of his earliest memories is of listening to the classic BBC radio serial "Journey Into Space." He remembers avidly reading and being both captivated and terrified by the 'Classics Illustrated' versions of H. G. Wells' "Time Machine" and "War of The Worlds" and one of his earliest purchases of books was the actual novel by Wells.

His education was broadly scientific leading him into laboratories in various private sector companies where he worked with iron and steel and organic chemical production.

A change of career led him into working for the British Government with responsibilities for economic statistics, including contributions to the British Balance of Payments data.

He remains a passionate advocate for the scientific view of the world and deplores the move to 'alternative facts' and the resurgence of outdated beliefs and ideas long thought confined to the waste bin. In particular, he is concerned about the existential threat of climate change, which forms a key section of his novel "Quantum Exile."

This theme also appears in the novel "The Cave of Shadows" where the worlds the characters inhabit are compared to Plato's parable of The Cave. A recurring idea that runs through all the works is that the universe which we experience is not what we think it is.

"Hideous Night" is the sequel to a short story in the collection "Domains of Darkness". The idea is not original—humanity is being preyed on by invisible parasites—but I believe the treatment is. I make use of the recent speculations in the theory of the Multiverse, in which "branes" may collide with each other in the multidimensional "Bulk".

"Doom of Stars", is the first in a duology and deals with speculations in the field of Black Holes and Wormholes. In the novel a brilliant female scientist finds a way of stabilizing black holes but the results are not what she expected. Instead a terrible cataclysm is unleashed upon the Solar system, forcing a brave group of young people to attempt to escape to a nearby star.

It is followed by "Resolution of Stars" which deals with the people left behind after the evacuation attempt. Maya, a young, beautiful scientist, flees into the far future hoping to find an Earth that has recovered from the disasters portrayed in "Doom". Instead she finds Karn, a simple primitive, who has no conception of the history of Earth or his place in it.

But together they discover that the Doom of Stars is still active and has not finished with them.