Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard: I didn’t need dialogue. I had faces.

In my case, I don’t need a face. I have dialogue…

I was born in Romania, my father Romanian and my mother Hungarian and grew up in an enclave where the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still mourned and Emperor Franz Joseph was mentioned often. We had objects in the house named after Austrian Emperors. My great-grand mother would greet the morning with the traditional Grüss Gott.

My mother brought me up to be an artist before I even learned to read and write—music, ballet, opera, theater and stories. My Hungarian grandfather was a fantastic and imaginative story teller, whose poetic license would cross into complete disregard for reality. Had he known of such things, he would have written science fiction. However, while part of my brain was fashioned to be an artist, the other part was that of a scientist.  I became an engineer.

And thus, all my life, my thinking has been oscillating in a rather dizzy fashion between the ways of science and the ways of art, going back and forth between the comets and stars of art and the black hole of engineering, shooting solar flares in all directions. As a result, I am an engineer who writes and paints, and an artist who studies astro-physics, cosmology and quantum physics.

I left my engineer’s profession to write and truly become an artist and live, as my mother would say, ‘the hard life of artists—happy night, sad day.’ But like Solzhenitsyn, who wrote his best in the Soviet gulag, I wrote enormously while in the corporate forced labor camps, but now…

My dream as a writer? The block-busting science fiction space opera trilogy.

Enough said.