I am a qualified Electronics engineer and worked in various engineering positions before moving into sales and marketing. I spent 12 years in a range of sales and marketing roles. My last role was as the European Marketing Manager for an electrical connector manufacturer supplying into the aerospace and military markets. The plot for Extinction has many influences and is meant to explore our fears over genetic research and cloning. Some of the influences include George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the Holocaust, Nazi ideology, Where Eagles Dare and Blade Runner to name just a few. I, like any normal person, am horrified by the ostracism of any one segment of society, particularly special needs and the like. However, as with Nazi Germany, certain governments have actively attempted to exterminate what they would call ‘freaks of nature’ for both financial and image reasons. This would also lead to a purer race, blue eyes and blonde hair for instance. There may be, in unscrupulous hands, the possibility of eradicating human embryos that do not meet certain levels of discrimination. This would be a travesty as my daughter, who suffers from Williams Syndrome, is the most wonderful, lovable child that you could hope to have and the disabilities that she has are only apparent in other people’s eyes (www.williamssyndrome.org.uk). I hope my book will first and foremost entertain people and get them to think about where science, particularly genetic science will lead the human race. Maybe it will provide a warning that we need to respect human boundaries and not meddle with natural selection or the quest for perfection with the use of science. I also hope my book will create further debate regarding the inequalities between the sexes and how damaging that can ultimately be. I believe that society has made progress in this regard, however recent studies have shown that there is still inequality in pay between men and women, for example. The book reflects what happens when discrimination is taken to an extreme, but I also wanted to show how important it is to have an appreciation of the differences between men and women. Each gender is one half of the same whole and the human race would lose its essential ‘humanity’ if either sex became extinct, and we lost the qualities associated with that gender and the synergy both bring together.