It's 'the right order of things'

 

“My first duty is to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.” – David Brin

 

Astro-Physicist Brin, born in California on Oct. 6, 1950, has earned a Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Award – basically a “clean sweep” of all the top awards in the Science Fiction genre and a testament to his "putting things in the right order."

His Campbell Award winning novel The Postman was adapted into a Kevin Costner feature film, and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society won both the Freedom of Speech Award (from the American Library Association) and the McGannon Communication Award.   His most recent books are Castaways of New Mojave and a short story collection, The Best of David Brin, both published in 2021.

 

A Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Brin helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC-San Diego.  A member of the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, he is a futurist consultant for corporations and government agencies and said he’s glad he was a scientist before becoming a writer.

 

“There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors write better science fiction," he said.   "And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.”