When this fine story came across our desks here at Titan, we were delighted.  Jack has been writing novels and short stories since before most of us were born.  No offense, Jack.  Back in the sixties, he was a charter member of the SFWA.  (Science Fiction Writer's Association.)  In the early sixties he published several short stories in Amazing Stories & Fantastic under Ziff-Davis.  Then, he says, "I got et up by the world."  He says he liked the SF days best and thinks he'll wander back that way.  We're honored to take part in his return.  You don't want to miss this story.
 

Twenty-First and Fifty--Click here to read the story.

About Jack Egan, in his own words:
 
From boyhood (1945) in an Air Corps/Army Air Force/US Air Force family, moving around as Dad was flying, I got to know a lot of places.  Ft. Worth, the Las Vegas desert, San Antone and quail hunts, Michigan and ice fishing Lake St. Clair, Boulder and riding above the Flatirons, Maxwell (Montgomery) and rafting the Alabama River, finally back to Texas, out to the ranching country… probably some things I’ve left out, as well.  Dad settled us on a small spread in the hill country north of Boerne Texas when I was 14.  By the time I was 17 (1963) and about to head for college, I’d published three stories in Amazing Stories and Fantastic Stories, then under Ziff-Davis.  Cele Goldsmith was my doorway to the universe of s-f writing, my shining star way off in far New York--my Dad’s home city, as well.  I’d have headed there in a minute, after that first sale, but cooler heads prevailed.  ‘Course, university life was a bit strange in 1963.  We were behind in the Space Race and deep in the Cold War.  I was encouraged to prepare for the inevitable, went into ROTC, and came out of St. Mary’s U in San Antonio in 1968 with a BS in psychology (enough credits for an English degree, and a full spread of science and math) and a commission in the Artillery, with in-between experience as a TV cameraman, astronomy lecturer and Red Tide biologist on the Gulf, married and a dad.  Now there was a proper mix for the Hippie generation!  After two years in grad school (experimental psych, worked with the Gemini astronauts at Brooks Aerospace Medical Center), I went to active duty as a Medical Service Corps officer.  Commanded medical units, worked in ERs, flew with medivacs, learned to respect the life decisions of a lot of determined young men, from many walks of life and many ideological persuasions, some curious, some furious, some grand, some bland, some surviving, some not.  When I got out, my first marriage had come to an end, mostly over the mutual dumb blindnesses of youth under the stresses of a country at war.  Still, I’d kept up with more grad school (U Louisville)--chemistry and biology, this time--and already served as a lecturer at planetariums, so I tried more of the same, with teaching thrown in, then was nearly killed in a motorcycle wreck (another love… the cycles, not the wreck!).  Took my wounded knees (1973) down to see a high school chum, Bill Rainey (now a Zool prof at Berkeley) who had become a scientist in the Caribbean; I wound up serving there as scientist, expedition medic, photographer and diver with an outfit called Island Resources Foundation, headquartered in St Thomas but roving the islands of the Caribbean Basin.  Now, that was a crazy, unique, devoted group of early environmental eco-scientists, driven by a brilliant dreamer named Dr. Ed Towle, doing amazing things for that bustling, busting-out sea of island nations, newly sovereigned, all of them searching with a kind of joyous desperation for a new course for their lives.  There was politics and there was sacrifice, there was crass stupidity and there was staggeringly courageous genius, there were heroes and martyrs and fanatically hard working peoples, suffering through the ebb and flow of disease, tropical storms, earnest statesmen and crazy politicians, well-meaning despots and cruel dictators, awash in the ideological rhetoric of Cold War America and Iron Curtain Communism, with a swift undertow of their own home-grown nationalisms.  I hope to do justice to a small part of that story some day…  Then, a new life, and a new wife still bravely learning the expeditionary ropes alongside me, when we decided to return to Texas for the sake of her firstborn’s imminent birth.  (Cindy took her last scuba dive off the boat on the open sea, three weeks before daughter Lari was born full term.)  Back in  San Antonio, we began building a family.  Assistant director of the San Antonio College Planetarium under a fine man named Brian Snow (who is still there), then a working researcher in cellular physiology, finishing up an MS in biology at Trinity University (1980), heavy on the then-new cutting-edge DNA chemistry.  Then, consulting for the Air Force (applying bacterial genetics to toxic waste breakdown) as they struggled to do their job while controlling co-generated environmental toxins.  (Few of the true stories of those good efforts get publicized, and that’s too bad.)  To the University of Texas Health Science Center as a senior research associate, then scientist, first with their biomaterials division, then with the department of surgery and Dr. MP Janowiack-Moyer’s Center for Human Cell Biotechnology while working (1987) on a PhD in “Cellular & Structural Biology.”  Molecular genetics and human cell tissue culture, cancer research in conjunction with the CHCB, then AIDS research, setting up a P-3 high risk biocontainment facility, brief work on the budget-axed Space Station Freedom bioreactor project--maybe it got re-funded later.  Got the doctoral academics and much lab effort successfully out of the way, but then had to head out into the business world in support of our maturing family (another one entering college) before I could get the thesis done, utilizing my component-level digital hardware and programming expertise in scientific and business endeavors.  Designed interfaces for a digital panoramic x-ray unit with a very gifted fellow doctoral candidate at the Health Science Center Dental School, and a spin-off ‘poor man’s CAT-scan.’  Worked with two geniuses, Barry K. Norling and Alfred Stewart Windeler by name, in their search for a way to improve the anchoring of synthetic joint, bone, and tooth materials by marrying industrial plasma manufacturing science to biomaterials.  Finally sidetracked (1990) into the management game, moving from MIS to exec vp of an interstate management services company, almost all the kids in college by then.  Somewhere along in there, my wife and I decided to peel off from the games others play (1995) and try it together on our own.  So now, we operate, one foot in Texas and one in Washington State, an information technology consulting firm called Triad Cyber, with one focus on assisting mid-sized companies in transitioning from small-scale IT & financial tools to the bigger leagues.  (I still get into other science-leaning pursuits as well: electronic instrumentation, specialty programming… and would you believe, writing?)  One daughter (Tracy) is a proud grad of Trinity U (like her Dad and her Mom, Bonnie) in Russian Studies, another (Lari) is in the midst of pre-med at UT, another (Autumn Aspen) on her way to a sophomore year leaning hard toward vet school, also at UT (with her Peruvian Paso, Bodego), and the last chick (Meghan Rose) is up here in the shade of Mt. Rainier with us, just setting foot in Junior High, dividing her time between ancient Egyptian history and knee-boarding Alder Lake.

And that, in 1149 words, more or less, is the basis of my claim to having lived through more than half of the 20th century.  I apologize profusely for inflicting it upon you.  Wrapped up in stories, it would play much more entertainingly.

Being very open-minded (as well as selectively deef, callused, and pretty damned ornery when aroused), the door (physical and electronic) is always open here to criticism, advice, consent, refusal, perusal, visitation, proclamation, requests and/or bequests.  I also make a mean pisco sour.

My parting comment is to challenge all those who enter the TITANZINE arena as spectators, to get off their life-experienced duffs, sharpen up their keypunchin’ digits (both of ‘em, if they work like mine), and try their own hand at presenting their experiences to the world, in one wrapper or another.  We islands need to keep up the exchange of ideas!  Not a doubt in my mind, after suffering through a fairly warlike century, that such overwater conversations are the secret to maintaining cool-headed human dominance over the future of Earth.  When islands quit talking, they forget how like themselves the other fellow really is, and just how much a clump of islands, joined together into a continent of purpose, can accomplish.

Oh, one more thing.  The “Last Frontier.”  Not to worry.  We dunderheaded humans are so far short of exploring or understanding even the local mudhole, there is absolutely no purpose to Alexandrian fretting about "nothing left to conquer."

So, OK, NEXT Generation.  Let’s see what you can do.

Nope.  Let me rephrase that.  Let’s see what we can do!
 

You can e-mail Jack 21&50-egan@spiralsea.com