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As I write this, in the autumn of 2025—we work well ahead of publication date for these columns—it is about seventy years since I began my career as a professional science fiction writer. That’s a goodly number of years to have sustained any sort of career, and I find it hard to conceal my surprise at having lasted this long. Please forgive me for casting a retrospective look across that immense span of time. It was my boyhood dream to write science fiction, once I started reading it in junior high school. I had discovered Jules Verne and H.G. Wells