Tucson, Twenty Second Century

I decided to set my most recent novel, That Which Endures, in Tucson in the twenty-second century. I've lived in Tucson for over four years, and find it and its high-desert surroundings most interesting. Instead of the dismal state of the future in many sci-fi novels, That Which Endures takes a positive spin, and "New" Tucson is the prime city of the state. Action occurs around the University, both the paleontological lab and the time-physics lab. Having a scientist and a highly professional 'escort' as the protagonists provided an enjoyable study in contrasts. The scientist and escort are actually platonic friends, but things change when the 'escort' finds herself coming alive emotionally, feeling actual love for the first time, and making a horrifying discovery of what she really is. The scientist, a paleontologist, finds a contemporary bullet in the fossil of a giant ground sloth from fourteen thousand years past, and has a unique chance to use a secret time-travel device to travel to the past to find how that happened. The escort is pursued by those who wish to kill her when they find what she has discovered, and escapes with the scientist by time travel, into a long-gone world, where they find themselves trapped with no way to reutrn.
I've had fun writing adventure stories before, but this one was particularly satisfying. The 'escort', named Sangrawee Pattanasai, (pure Thai) develops into a noble character that I'd like to use in future books. The more I worked with her, the more attractive a person she became: beautiful, resourceful and highly intelligent. The future world has its share of evil, but there are bright lights of experience that I bring to the Tucson of the future.