My father eventually started putting more challenging books in my room. At an early age, I was reading Jules Verne and HG Wells. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds captivated me. Something profound leaked from my psyche when the alien ships in War, so close to destroying humanity, began to crash as they succumbed to the common cold.

“Martians—dead! —slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” ~ HG Wells.

I remember this overwhelming feeling that something else was going on in the Universe, and it was just on the edge of my understanding. Were diseases placed on earth to protect us from an Alien invasion? Did HG Wells make it up, or did he have some more profound knowledge of how the Universe operated? I felt some interaction between the world I saw around me and things that remained unseen and unexplained. Was this God? Would he reveal himself? Was there some deeper meaning? I knew then that these authors were trying to answer these same questions. (Rendition of 1953 movie by StarGliderNF)