About Till Noever
Author biographies…
Too much temptation to rant on about one’s growing-pains, misunderstood-ness and things like that; often followed by false-modesty-but-still-self-congratulatory spiels of one’s personal resilience in overcoming obstacles, etc, blissfully ignoring the incomparable Jack Vance’s sage advice: “The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.”
Still, readers may be curious. It’s also true that one’s life experiences, especially the not-so-good ones, are formative; as are the attitudes and philosophies they have bred. So, while I think that the best way to get to know an author is by reading her or his fiction—which is what I, for entirely commercial reasons, I suggest you do ☺️—a bit of backgrounding may be useful.
I was born last century in Germany, into a family of visual artists; surrounded by books and with TV being actively discouraged. I read like it was going out of fashion by the time I was seven, grew up on Grimm’s and Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, Karl May’s adventures, American crime fiction, and German pulp sci-fi, especially the perennial Perry Rhodan series. There was also my exposure to RaumPatrouille Orion, first ever real sci-fi TV series, predating Star Trek TOS by just a few months and rather different—in a very Germanic kind of way—in concept and implementation. Truth be told, Star Trek was far more appealing, but I found that out only years later.
I also developed a very early preoccupation with mortality. Personal extinction, decided the 6-7 year-old, is a bad thing and to be avoided at all costs. When that breathtakingly unique creature you are is gone… Well, it’s gone. For good. Never mind the fantasies people have invented to delude themselves into denial of this grim reality. Quite a few decades later I still believe that what child-me intuited holds true.
After my compulsory 12-year stint at school—the last years spent at a high school whose focus was on languages—Latin: meh; French: meh; English: cool; Spanish: learned outside school while living in Spain: love it—I finished the process without acing any of the language subjects (I especially sucked majorly at Commentarii de Bello Gallico), but acing physics and math, which were my favorite subjects, despite the teachers’ deficiencies—I went off to follow my interest in the stars, the universe, the multiverse and all that, and studied astrophysics for over a year. One day I told myself “Enough school!”, walked out in the middle of a lecture and applied for and got an assisted-passage immigration visa to Australia; just about as antipodean to my former life as I could go. I spent some time traveling around Australia and some of South- and Central America, before resuming my studies in Australia and later New Zealand; this time mixing physics with the life-, computer- and cognitive sciences; which is probably why I kept on looking for the roots of, and maybe some explanation for, human cognition, mind and everything else about humans in fundamental physics. Along my way through academia I collected a number of degrees, including a B.Sc. and M.Sc in Physics, plus over a decade later an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science.
Degrees are handy, but they don’t necessarily make one rich. I know mine didn’t, but they helped me look at science from a lot of different perspectives. I continue to have an ongoing and lively interest in all aspects of science, with fundamental quantum physics, biomedicine and the very broad, fascinating realm of ‘cognitive science’ ranking at the top. However, to earn a living I went into computing and software engineering for many years, most of it in a biomedical context. In the late 1990s I gave software development away and converted myself into a technical writer, editor and video producer. One of the results, Dating Blind, was my shot at a romcom set in Dunedin, done with friends, family and drama students and demonstrating that one can make a movie for less than $500; never mind the 2001 video and processing equipment and resulting low-budget production issues.
After spending several years in the UK, US and Japan, my family settled in the only city I’ve ever actually truly liked—Dunedin, New Zealand—where we lived for almost twenty years. There I picked up fencing and later Japanese sword craft. However, right now we’re camping out, for a while anyway, in inner-suburban Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; mainly so we can be close to our daughters and grandchildren. Whatever happens next, who knows? Life has a habit of presenting one with the unexpected. That’s a part of what makes it so fascinating.
Since I don’t do social media, owlglass.net and other URLs linking to owlglass.net are the only personal internet connections to my work. However, my books are available from and therefore listed with most eBook distributors.