I got hooked on SF-Literature very early in life. My brother-in-law at the time had a collection of Perry Rhodan covers on his bookshelf and I started reading in them and from then on read classics like Dune or Snow Crash, stuff by Stanislav Lem, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Robert Wilson etc. etc. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gave me the best times when I was about in my early twenties and I wrote out my favourite passages on big posters and hung them up in my room.

Reading it didn't make me a futurist though, I see space colonisation and the imaginative pursuit of that idea as a form of perspective shift in an earthly context.

The imagination of humans is enormous, though I think technology, as it increases in pace and intensity, comes with a price tag, so I am ambivalent about it in some parts.

Part of me is shaped by my family history, I feel this influence in the desire to preserve culture, which certainly has to do with the history of expulsion and imprisonment of my parents and grandparents who had to fight for their lives as strangers far from home and to preserve their identity.
It is difficult for me to completely let go of traditions I observed and experienced as a child, but it would go too far to elaborate here.

We good old Germans intensively? HaHa!
You rarely hear that, I had always thought it was a typical North American trait to organise sensational events. We certainly, as a former occupied country, have incorporated a lot of that culture into our own. I've been so used to older siblings philandering with both British and Americans in my childhood, the music charts all listing English titles and so on, that I now have a bit of difficulty adapting to other influences.

It took us almost forty years to dare to produce song lyrics in our own German language, I don't know if the term "Neue Deutsche Welle" means anything to you?

When your country is one of the defeated and as a child you don't understand such conflicts of your parents that have to do with what happened, you simply adapt to what is happening in real terms and accept as good and fine what the previous generation couldn't swallow quite so easily. For us kids, the Tommies and the Ammies were just exciting!

I am far more a child of the twentieth century than someone my age who was raised and educated under different circumstances.

Here you can read something about the history of the Russian-Germans, a personal attempt to understand my origins.

Yes, I have fond memories from those exciting times when I worked in the media sector :)

I had no groupies, but plenty of admirers in my womanly life. ;-)