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My parents were born just before the start of the twentieth century; my youngest grandchild arrived at the end of the twentieth century. The years of my life have been the most dynamic in the history of the human race. Technical knowledge has exploded; so has the Earth's human population. We can create almost anything, yet each day we lose parts of our planet that can never be replaced.

I'm greedy: I want to write about all of it - the history, the grief, joy, and excitement of being human in times past; the cutting-edge inventions of times now here.

When I work on a book like GOOD-BYE, BILLY RADISH, I find my way back home to the smoky, sooty, western Pennsylvania town where flames from smokestacks set fire to the night. Today the smoke is gone, and so are the steel mills, but in my own memory, and through the stories my parents told me, I can recreate that time and place. It's important that I do that, because if I don't, no one will remember the rumbles and shrieks of the mills, the smell of the smoke, the blaze of the furnaces, and the enormous power of the steel mills over the townspeople.

Novels about times past are easy to research, because we know what happened then. The future is a mystery.

We can only imagine what it will be like: virtual worlds where people can touch things that aren't real, and move around in them, and move them around to wherever they please; technical wizardry that may make life perfect, or - if we're unlucky - could create disasters worldwide; genetic engineering that might raise humans and animals and viruses into superior beings, or perhaps, flaw them tragically.

In THE VIRTUAL WAR CHRONOLOGS, I’ve tried to imagine all these possibilities. The CHRONOLOGS begin in the year 2080. I won't be around then to discover whether any of my predictions have come true, but many of my readers will live in that wonderful (we hope) and exciting time - Earth's future.

Caught up in the wonderment of the world to come, and infused with equal wonderment over the world long past, I think how lucky I am to be a writer, to be the channel through which this knowledge flows. As much as I admire the work of scientists and engineers and historians and archaeologists, I think my job is the best. I get to have it all.

I only wish I could live forever, so I could see how the future turns out.

I do NOT feel the way Sergei Rachmaninoff did when he wrote that. I have a lot to say, and a lot to write about concerning these times, the here and now. But I also write about the times before I was born. My books The Tempering and Good-bye, Billy Radish are set in a steel town just like Duquesne, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. My father worked in the steel mill. So did every other man in our family. It was dirty, dangerous work.

Coal mining is even dirtier work and even more dangerous. In my novel Rockbuster I wrote about coal mining in Utah. In Rockbuster, the hero named Tommy works in a coal mine, and he lost his father in a mine cave-in. My book was almost prophetic of the Utah mine disaster and others that happened before that, and will, unhappily, happen again.

For a very different kind of book, my daughter Alane Ferguson and I co-author the National Parks Mystery series. We've written 13 mysteries, each one set in a different national park, each about dangerous or threatened species of animals. We've visited every park we wrote about, which was great fun because Alane is a smart and beautiful writer who likes to make people laugh.