Demetrios was born a child of the space age.
When he was ten, his parents asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and of course he said a microscope and a telescope. On the third Friday of every month his friend’s family would take him with them to meetings of the St. Louis Astronomical Society, and to its summer convention out-of-town. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he built lasers to adapt a radio interferometer to observe alcohol and ammonia in the dust clouds where stars are born.
His first job was to observe quasars at the edge of the observable universe, in order to measure the irregularities in the rotation of the Earth. A decade or two later he got into atomic clocks, and became director of the department that sets the time for GPS, and much of the world. Now, as Chief Scientist, he often asks himself what-if questions about space and time, and large and small. Every now and then, they lead to science fiction stories that sometimes get published. He says it’s funny how writing a few stories that are admittedly pure fiction gives him more pleasure than most of his 150-odd professional publications. But not more pleasure than his children and granddaughter give him
Demetrios adds: “A story that reflects my “wild youth” is here: http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue761/sun-lovers.html, but you, if you have $4.03 to spare, might wish to buy a used copy of the excellent anthology Trust and Treachery, which has some stories in it that are better. Terrible Lizards is my contribution.”
Read his work in Altered Reality Magazine
