My name isn’t Martin Grise. It’s a pseudonym and it’s handy. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” I’m an academic by training, and I burnish that public face. I publish articles and books in my field, teach students, give public talks, all the usual. I’m a fairly good professor. But I wasn’t raised by academics; I grew up in a blue-collar family in a hollow shell of a town where the sustaining industry died before I was born and the people left behind like human flotsam. That dour world of dead-end jobs, dirty bars, of clinging to sanity between paychecks and weekends is where I’m from. Then I entered the university and learned how the world works, what globalization does to cultures and families, how elites control foreign policy for their own benefit; but I also learned through travel, and I don’t mean tourism. People in several countries opened their homes to me, common people, indigenous people. They taught me about their daily lives, their religions, their problems, their dreams, and I saw academic theories playing out in peoples’ lives. The university taught my mind, and the people taught my heart. That’s real education, something I treasure. And then there’s what Fritz Leiber Jr. called “the true spirit of adventure,” that adolescent, devil-may-care, joyful recklessness that the best people never entirely outgrow. In all my writing, advocacy, research, and teaching, I’ve never forgotten the adventure stories of my youth, and I continue writing them because, no matter how many degrees I earn, they keep banging on the back door of my mind, clamoring for a drink. That’s the reason for the pseudonym, you see – in the academic world, I would be pilloried in some quarters if it was known I spent some of my time writing popular fiction about war, crime, science fiction, and espionage. He should be researching, or applying for the next grant; what kind of professor is he? Doesn’t he have enough work to do? So the mask of Martin Grise, that scamp, shields me from all that and protects my steady paycheck and pension.