I am so cool. But then... you already knew that about me. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here! I'm sure you came to this section to find out all about my sordid past and what makes me, well, the fabulous me you know and love. So here you go --

A Brief History of Seamus Zelazny Harper, Volume One

How to boil the life of such a man, filled as it's been with adventure, romance, and danger, into a few simple sentences?

Well, you can't, but here goes anyway:

I was born on that hellhole we lovingly call Earth in a little village in upstate Massachusetts-Dunwich, you've probably never heard of it. Anyhoo, my parents and their relatives thought it'd be a safe place to raise their kids away from Nietzschean authority. Wrong! It turns out that living outside the cities makes you fresh bait for any Magog raiding parties that happen to be in the neighborhood. After learning that lesson the hard way, we moved back to a refugee camp near Boston harbor, where we were allowed to live under the "protection" of the local Nietzschean garrison.

Big improvement, right? So I basically grew to adulthood on top of that big freakin' dungheap. I was always good with machines, so I scavenged broken pieces of tech from the garbage dump just outside the garrison and fixed them up. Then I could either sell them on the black market or give them to my folks to use. If I ever got caught boosting from Nietzscheans - even their trash! - it meant summary execution. Lucky for me I never got caught.

So after my parents died, I fell in with some of the local neighborhood protection societies (you could be nice and call 'em that), fixing their stuff and running odd errands on their behalf. And that's what I was doing when the hand of the Divine reached down, tapped Harper on the shoulder and said "hey kid, I've got big plans for you." Actually, it was Beka Valentine and her psycho ex-boyfriend Bobby, who through a highly improbable chain of events took me on as a member of their crew. So I went from dining on rats and dodging Dragan patrols to cruising through space on the Eureka Maru as their new chief engineer.

Which ruled and all, but then I hit life's big jackpot - again! I am of course referring to our salvage mission to pull the Andromeda Ascendant out of a black hole's gravity well. To make a long story short, instead of handing her over to the galaxy's sleaziest Nightsider and pocketing our commission (my share is 84,000 thrones, in case anyone's interested), we ended up signing on with Dylan Hunt and becoming her new crew. Score! And thus began my (hopefully) long and fruitful tour of duty as chief engineer and all-purpose-smart-guy for the starship Andromeda Ascendant. Long may I reign.

Head over there to find out how things have been going on the good ship Andromeda lately.