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I
grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an
hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book,
which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense
of curiosity that I had. And you know, that curiosity also manifested
itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and
taking "samples" — frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water — and bringing it back,
looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all
about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.
And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what
was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring
the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials
that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously
imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.
And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't
video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape,
I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a
book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads.