THE SHORT STORY
Hi, I'm Lee. I'm a science fiction writer by early morning, a technology lawyer by day, and an avid reader in all the other spare moments I can find. I have two dogs, a robot vacuum named Cinderella, and probably spend far too much time online learning things and arguing with people. These facts all may or may not be related.
At the end of the day, I write because the world is such a brilliant, bloody, fascinating place. I write because not a day goes by without me learning something new and thinking what if…
And I write to connect people with stories. If just one person reads something of mine that makes them look at the world a different way, then I'll count that as a success. So thanks for joining me on this journey.
THE LONG STORY
Long ago (just over a quarter of a century), I was lucky enough to be born in a small private hospital in a developed country, at a time and place when the neonatal death rate was roughly one in 250 live births and I got to be one of the lucky 249.
I was even luckier to be born to two incredibly different people, each with their own lessons and stories. My father grew up in a poor village as one of five children. As a kid, when he was hungry after school and his mother was still at work, his older sister would boil water with a few drops of soy sauce and feed it to her siblings. In all his years, he has never lost that hunger. It’s still there in the way he pursues knowledge at the cutting-edge of regenerative medicine and his drive to help people with profoundly complex health issues. I am shaped by that hunger as much as I am shaped by my mother, a psychologist who woke up one day and realised she had fourDue to a mixture of environmental factors, genetics and a dice roll, one of them developed severe autism. In between caring for him and delightedly conducting social experiments on us, she read us her favourite classics. They remain her greatest gifts to me: The Horse and his Boy. The Hobbit. Watership Down. Because of them I started picking up other stories that fascinated me: Fahrenheit 451. Brave New World. Slaughterhouse-Five. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. And so many more.
With a childhood like that, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that I fell in love with science, with psychology, and -above all - with stories. So here I am now. A technology lawyer by day, learning how to anticipate everything that might go wrong with humans and how they use technology, and the quiet machinery behind how to prevent it, from the best minds in the world. A writer by early morning, trying to imbue meaning into pieces of our chaotic world. And just another person stumbling along in the dark with you, hoping enough of us find each other that we can make a difference together.
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