Robert Maas was born in England. From Wells and Wyndham to Ballard and beyond, he has reveled in the multitude of ways in which his home has been destroyed by vengeful nature and marauding and discriminating aliens. He now lives in Tokyo, enabling him to experience the destruction of his home in many new and inventive ways. In “The Smart Core Manifesto,” Maas defined a body of speculative fiction, stretching back to the 19th century, that embraces scientific verisimilitude rooted in the universe we perceive and maintains a bailiwick against the worst encroachments of fantasy. In his own smart core, ordinary people are faced with extraordinary challenges and terrifying odds. They are not heroes. They don’t have superpowers to aid them or magic to save them. They fight, and sometimes they fail. Whether good or bad, right or wrong, Maas’s humans are lost only when they abandon the things that make them worthy of their own respect. Note: I am not the same author who writes books on taxation, though their books appear on my page in Goodreads.