Author! Author!
Gordon Savage was born in Winchester, Kentucky, but his father was a bridge engineer for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and went where the work was, so he didn’t stay there long. Gordon is the author of Peacemaker and the Teleportal series with a third in progress. The Teleportal books follow the complications caused by the development of instantaneous transportation, where the use and mis-use of the devices impact on the developers and their supporters. His book, Peacemaker, is set on a colony planet, years in the future, where human ambition covertly guides a rebellion and a single naval officer must rely on wits, not firepower, to subdue the rebellion.
Gordon has always daydreamed in words rather than pictures. As a result, he began composing science fiction stories verbally when he was about nine – his daydreams. Walking to school one morning he saw an army recruiting poster in a post office window. It had a picture of a "true" spaceship against a star-laden backdrop. That image reached out and grabbed him. He wanted to be on that spaceship, exploring the solar system. From then on he told himself stories focused on getting into space.
Shortly after that his family moved to Guam. The magazines in the barber shop were a treasure trove. He discovered written science fiction in the form of Astounding (now Analog) and Galaxy (now defunct) magazines, and he was hooked. He not only read it, but he also began to write it. None of it amounted to much, but it was a start.
When he graduated from high school, he entered the second class at the Air Force Academy. The time he once had frittered away on writing disappeared in school work and dating. After graduation he married Carol Larsen and started twenty years of service in the Air Force. He followed that with eighteen years as a software engineer, but the urge to write never disappeared completely. He wrote when he had time.
Throughout, he continued to be an avid reader of science fiction: Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Poul Anderson. He was especially taken by Zenna Henderson’s People series. Eventually he joined Toastmasters and developed the idea that he could become a professional speaker. A program he attended to learn more about professional speaking introduced him to accountability partners. Their help changed his course. Instead of writing material to sell "at the back of the room," he got back to writing fiction, and Anderson became his guiding light. In fact, he suspects that one of Anderson’s short stories, “A Live Coward,” was his inspiration for Peacemaker because at some point his protagonist, Gus Colt, sprang out of his imagination. The result is a story in which wits and daring are more important than strength of arms.
As he was writing Peacemaker, he discovered that his talent for solving abstruse scientific problems was only mediocre, but action/adventure came easy. He supposes that was why he's gotten comments that Peacemaker reads like a western. Hey, he's writing to tell stories. If they do their job and entertain, he doesn't care how they are categorized. For instance, his second novel, Teleportal, is based on a device that doesn't exist, but it looks at the impact a teleportal could have on society and what people might do to the ones who developed it.
He lives on five acres outside Elizabeth, Colorado, with Carol and two cats. He has three grandchildren and a great grandson whom he doesn’t get to see nearly often enough, and he’s dreaming about yet another speculative adventure.