S.J. Stevenson

SO WHO IS HE?

S.J. Stevenson was born in a hospital, because his mother was sensible that way, and thought this was a much better option than giving birth in a carpark, a supermarket, or midway through a parachute jump. 

Remarkably, despite this auspicious event, the selected hospital was not given heritage status and no blue plaque adorns its wall to commemorate the occasion. Instead the blighters bulldozed the place to the ground and probably sowed the soil with salt too. Which only goes to show. 

His parents called him Shaun, which was quite an extraordinary coincidence, because it turned out almost everyone else called him that as well. Apart from his teachers who usually called him 'For crying out loud, will you pay attention instead of staring out the window'. However, this was quite a mouthful and so the name never really caught on for general usage.

However, before he even started school, and with a courage quite astonishing for a child who was not yet four, Shaun moved house for the first time. Perhaps sensibly he took the rest of his family with him, as it would have been quite lonely there on his own. Besides there were skills he still lacked at the time. Like cooking, cleaning and the balancing of household finances - a feat that would anyway have been highly difficult to achieve on pocket money of only 10 pence per week. 

As an adult, Shaun moved in with his fiancée, Cathy’ who had taken the ‘diamond bribe’ and was afterwards afforded no opportunity to extricate herself from this foolishness. They conspired to acquire two offspring, who have hung around ever since, doing all the usual delightful things of offspring everywhere, such as costing a great deal of money and refusing to do any chores.

Shaun's education attained its zenith when he scraped a first class honours degree in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield. Tragically this degree was of no value to contemporary society, as simply sitting down and thinking about stuff rarely actually achieves anything useful like selling gizmos, widgets, thingies or any of the other everyday, indispensable necessities of modern life. Toga wearing and running out into the street mid-bath are also apparently frowned on too. And besides, whenever he did this, Shaun tended to rediscover the peculiarly unbenign qualities of the local British climate and had to rush back inside before getting frostbite and / or arrested by the local constabulary. 

Still, at least he could be, er, philosophical about it, so that was alright and the cosmic harmony sort-of-thing has overall probably been maintained.

After struggling to find an ivory tower to contemplate matters of deep importance within, Shaun instead muckled down and joined a company called Orbis where he did something that possibly might have been called work to the uninitiated.

The job was so rich and fulfilling that Shaun wasted no time whatsoever (i.e. about 2 years) finding something else. He achieved this when he went to work at a solicitor’s office. This job was indeed something else which was about the best thing it had going for it.

Eventually the dislike of working for a millionaire who apparently couldn’t afford to put lightbulbs in the gents and the commensurate frustrations attached with the need to over-regularly clean his shoes (sometimes whilst still in the dark and smelling faintly of wee) drove Shaun elsewhere.

Fortunately ‘round the bend’ was only the first stop on this journey and the next involved joining the UK Civil Service. This continues to keep Shaun out of trouble and in beer most of the time, and is to be highly commended for therefore indeed serving the world by making it a more civil place.

Within all this, Shaun has never quite shaken his great ambition to tell stories of such devastating profundity, that society would be quite changed forever by the depth and intensity of his insights. 

Alas, his various scribblings have not quite achieved this, however, in 2025, Shaun was a winning entrant in Volume 42 of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest, with his story 'The Triceratops Effect'. He was really rather chuffed about this. Actually this understates things - he was so over the moon, that he was able to wave to the ISS astronauts as he went whizzing by!

BIG DEAL. WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Honestly? You probably shouldn't. But to be fair, if you've made it to this point after ploughing through all the waffle above, then presumably you already do care - at least a little bit! 

Anyway, you can sign up to get updates about his jottings here.