The Jupiter Theft

Donald Moffitt was born in Boston, and now lives’ in rural Maine with his wife, Ann, a native of Connecticut. A former public relations executive, industrial film maker, and ghostwriter, he has been writing fiction, on and off, for more than twenty years under an assortment of pen names, including his own, chiefly espionage novels, and adventure stories in international settings. The Jupiter Theft is his first full-length science-fiction story and the first book of any genre to be published under his own name. “One of the rewards of being a public relations-man specializing in the technical end of large corporate accounts,” he says, “was being allowed to hang around on the fringes of research being done in such widely disparate fields as computer technology, high-energy physics, the manned space program, polymer chemistry, parasitology, and virology—even, on a number of happy occasions, being pressed into service as an unpaid lab assistant.” He became an enthusiastic addict of science fiction during the Golden Era, when Martians were red, Venusians green, Mercurians yellow, and “Jovian Dawn Men” always blue. He survived to see the medium become respectable, and is cheered by recent signs that the fun is coming back to SF.