S.J. Stevenson

SO WHO IS HE?

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

Remarkably, despite this auspicious event, the lucky hospital was not given heritage status and no blue plaque adorns its wall. 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 and stop staring out the window?' However, this was quite a mouthful and so that name never really caught on.

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 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 limited value to contemporary society, as sitting down and pondering deeeeep thoughts, 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 British climate. Then he'd have to rush back inside before getting frostbite and / or arrested by the local constabulary. 

Having failed to find an ivory tower from within which he could contemplate matters of eternal significance, Shaun instead muckled down and joined a company called Orbis where he did something that might have been called work to the uninitiated.

The job was so rich and fulfilling that Shaun wasted no time whatsoever (i.e. about two 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, events conspired to drive Shaun elsewhere, in particular, the dislike of working for a millionaire who apparently couldn’t afford to put lightbulbs in the gents - along with the commensurate frustrations of needing to regularly clean wee-scented shoes.

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 making Shaun's world a more civil place.

Within all this, Shaun has never quite shaken his great ambition to tell stories of such devastating profundity, that society will 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 Shaun's jottings here.