I'm afraid it's been 22 years. Scary, isn't it? I can remember typing my way through the novel ... yes, typing. I didn't have a good enough computer in '85. I had one of those green-screen Amstrad things, and it used to fry my eyeballs. The first versions of ICE, WIND AND FIRE, and DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT, and several others, were produced on that green-screen monster. NOCTURNE was one of them. But when it came to DEATH'S HEAD, I decided to turn it off and revert to the typewriter ... in fact, I had a new one at the time. And it wasn't even an electric. My Adler was one of those manual machines that fed an ink ribbon ... and if you're under 30 years old today, you probably think those machines are a wicked figment of someone's vicious imagination. Then again, you also believe music ALWAYS came on shiny little disks. There's folks who'd argue with you ... and some of us have the black plastic to prove it. (Lest you get the impression Keegan's up there with Methuselah, I'll spill the beans. Johnny Depp, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, and Mel Keegan are all more or less the same age, give or take a couple of years. And I don't think I'd want to be making 'Methuselah' cracks about Cap'n Jack, Aragorn and Sharpe! There ... put in those terms, it didn't sound so bad. I feel much better now.)

Of course, there's a whole dimension in these stories, now, that didn't exist even in my own mind in 1985. For example, aeroball. The concept of 'Aerosports' didn't occur to me till these last ten years, in the 'long dark dead-zone' between EQUINOX and SCORPIO, when I suspected GMP was winding down but I had not yet made the connection with DreamCraft. The inspiration for Aerosports came to me when I was watching and reading an odd, eclectic assortment of things all at once. I was watching some rugby games ... and the movie Rollerball, and leafing through some old 2000 AD comics. In one of those, there's a character (he could have appeared in one of the Judge Dredd strips; I don't remember ... he certainly never appeared in the much-lamented movie [and before anyone asks, I liked the movie a lot]), and this character rides an anti-gravity powered surfboard. He 'air surfed' all the way from Mega City One in the US, to Sydney. Cool. And then, somewhere between the All Blacks, the Rollerball and the comics, Aeroball popped into my mind — fully fledged, rules, team uniforms and all. If gravity resist ever happens (and it's a big 'if'), you know without any moment of doubt, there will be low-grav sports in a matter of weeks after the technology comes available. In the meantime, I suspect athletes will train on Earth, and the games would be played on the Moon. The team bus would lift off from the training area, where these athletes play something like a cross between basketball and wrestling ... but they train in weighted boots, belts, collars. Then suddenly they're in one-sixth lunar gravity, and wham. Aeroball, with an audience of billions back home on Earth. (And, woah, can you imagine trying to get tickets to be in the actual stadium at Copernicus, for the finals?!)

I had so much fun with this in APHELION, but I don't want to have plot spoilers in here, so I'm not going to say another word. If you want to see the whole thing in action, download the sample chapters and ... enjoy!