WHEN YOU TELL PEOPLE YOU WRITE SCIENCE FICTION, they say, “Oh, spaceships and aliens,” and then want to know your qualifications. “How do you think up those strange worlds?” they ask. “I suppose you majored in science.”

It’s best to nod, even if you majored in English. You won’t get anywhere trying to explain that you subscribe to the Miss Marple theory of literature, which maintains that you don’t have to go farther than your front yard to understand the universe. (Even though Jane Austen subscribed to it, too.) And it’s no good telling them that your qualifications are that you’ve seen some strange worlds, all right, and you didn’t need a spaceship to get to them. They probably wouldn’t understand.

I’ve sung in church choirs, had Mary Kay facials, put on garage sales. I’ve been to the mall and the orthodontist and the second-grade Valentine’s party. I’ve even been to Tupperware parties—only slightly stranger than Venusian eyestalk-bonding ceremonies—at which you participate in arcane contests (“How many words can you make out of ‘Tupperware’?” “Warp, put, upper, rue …” I always win. It’s the only thing majoring in English is good for) and eat ritual preparations of Cool Whip and graham-cracker crumbs and purchase plastic boxes that burp.

Science fiction? Piece of cake. (“Pert, rat, paw, tarp, prate, weep, apt, true, wart, Ra …”)