Christopher James

Christopher James Biography

In 2025, my wife and I bought a Mercedes Sprinter van. I fantasized about getting one of these vans and doing a light conversion on it, for around 6 years, before my wife and I ever had children. The idea of being able to walk around your vehicle, to almost be able to live in it, captured my imagination. We loved to tent camp, as well. Hell, I loved just sleeping out under the starts.

Eventually, we had three kids, and our lives changed alot. We would take them camping, of course, but we always wanted to travel with them – it was something neither me or my wife did much with our families as children. We wanted to visit as many national parks, and as many states, as we could. We outfitted the van to have all the amenities we would need to sleep in it as often as we needed, supplementing it with tent camping and the occasional hotel stay.

I’m a huge science fiction fan, and always have been. In the years since I had kids, I started “reading” a lot more. I put reading in quotes because I mostly consume via audiobook. Science fiction is all I “read”. In particular, science fiction that involves starships always moved me in ways I cannot describe, capturing my imagination entirely. I wanted, and continue to want, so badly, to have a starship of my own. Space – the final frontier, has captivated me since I was a child. I consistently answered “Astronaut” to any question about career choice. Not just science fiction stories about space, space itself. The wonders and mysteries of the interstellar world in general. I should have been an astrophysicist, in hindsight.

The Sprinter van almost felt, to me, like my own little starship. Our plans to travel, to just get in the van and go wherever we wanted to go, seemed to scratch that starship itch for me in all the right ways. Of course, the interstellar aspect would be left wanting. We wouldn’t be docking with space stations or going to distant, uninhabited worlds, but that wasn’t something anyone could do in 2025, so I would have to make due.

Starship Fable is inspired by the collision of these two worlds. My own personal life and my fantasies of traveling the stars. Jack is a lot like me, in ways I’m not necessarily proud of. My wife is a lot like Marie, aside from a bold and violent backstory. Our three kids, though our children were much younger at the time I wrote this story (3,4, and 5), are written to embody them. We have two bookending girls and a boy in the middle, and they are our entire lives. For better or for worse.

I wanted to give you a little insight into the inspiration for this series, a story about a father making his way through a harsh interstellar life. I hope you enjoy.