Author's Portfolio

I'm an academic research scientist at work in Boston. When I'm not conjuring in the lab, I write and review fiction, a skill I developed as an unexpected benefit of chronic insomnia. Today, I am an Assistant Professor of Neurology in the Shriver Center for Mental Retardation (an affiliate of Harvard Medical), a position won some tumultuous years after I arrived in the United States from Greece to pursue my studies in biology and astrophysics as a scholarship student at Harvard University.

Non-fiction was somewhat of an excursion, since most my initial forays into the published word were fiction pieces -- mostly fantasy and science fiction stories, some of which I have published in After Hours. This was a literary magazine owned and operated by a Californian named William Raley who darkly hinted in each issue, "This is the magazine your mother warned you about." I still haven't sent out two long multi-partite novels (a fantasy saga and a science fiction thriller) that are in various stages of completion. An editor was at the verge of publishing an entire collection of my stories, when her Press abruptly shifted gears. Yet luck can run in the other direction, too: I secured representation for To Seek Out New Life after hammering out a two-page memo to a literary agent in New York.

I am a voracious reader, building my library from works of fiction, biography, history and science in four languages. Around eight years ago, I started reviewing books for Belles Lettres and in 1992 for The Harvard Review; the latter assignment is continuing to this day. I have travelled extensively in Europe and the United States, and would travel even more if my benchwork allowed it. I do not play an instrument, though I keep threatening to take up the bagpipes. However, I can sing on-key in the four languages that I know -- all of which I speak with a slight accent.

Featured on this page are some of my works in literary criticism and fiction. Here you will also find the text of several talks I gave, as well as articles which I wrote for the SETI League, Astronomy and MS-NBC about space exploration. Enjoy!

The Mars Society International Convention

Making Aliens

The SETI League

E. T., Call Springer-Verlag!

The Planetary Society's Planetfest99

Earth Brains, Star Minds

Astronomy

Good Planets are Hard to Find

MS-NBC

Space and Spirit

Harvard Review

The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. A collection of fragments by Wayne Koestenbaum.