Stephen Pocklington

Stephen Pocklington lives on a small Certified Wildlife Habitat within the High Rock Lake-Yadkin River Watershed in North Carolina. This haven is shared with his partner of twenty-four years, their dog Lucille Rose, and a growing number of other secies. Amidst this wildlife, the family persists in cultivating formal vegetable and flower gardens, due to which the world has been mercifully spared from several imagined novels.

Stephen is a bruised idealist who's evolved into an apprehensive realist trying to become a decent meliorist. He understands Humanity's peril well enough to be duly alarmed but still believes in human potential. Thus, he remains strangely disposed to imagine humans completing their evolutionary leap into rationality, though, at seventy-four, probably not in his lifetime. He also believes (irrationally) that humans may still be capable of preserving our planet's capacity to sustain us, if only just barely.

Given the context of this novel, readers should note that Stephen holds fast to the precept, Cause no unnecessary harm, and hasn't fired any weapons since the Army took them away, deemed him unfit, and sent him home in 1981. He was a fairly good shot, but then he got better. Since laying down the sword, he has relied entirely on his somewhat bloody pen.