You might wonder why a writer who writes about man’s place in nature would write so many stories set in outer space. My latest published story, “At The Edge of the Crater, “ takes place on the grim but fascinating asteroid 16 Psyche, While I do celebrate nature, I do not idealize it.

A vital step in understanding ourselves is to recognize both our nobility and fragility, and most important, to see our world for what it is, a dazzling and gorgeous home that is both refuge and battlefield. We are, at our core, “bad-weather animals,” in Robert Ardrey’s famous phrase. We are fighters and survivors.

Yet in that fight, we are not alone. We are individuals but we are also social beings, creatures who are “fulfilled only in the natural associations built upon common experience, upon the ties of blood and friendship, common enterprise, resistance to common enemies, and a common faith, ” as Mel Bradford described us. Survival is a struggle, but we don’t have to wage it alone.

Space is the perfect backdrop to focus our attention on human characters caught in that struggle. In “At the Edge of the Crater,” the severe setting magnifies the brave, foolhardy, and tenacious protagonist as he discovers who he is and what he is made of.