My first loves were the fantasy novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with their poetic Victorian prose and exotic scenery in Africa, beneath the Earth, and elsewhere in Space and Time. Then I discovered the landscapes of the Solar System as photographed by the Voyager space-probes, and the universe opened up to me. Who needs alien worlds when our own are so strange and exotic. Besides, with fusion-power, we could get there as quickly as stellar drive crosses the galaxy in Star Trek and Star Wars.