About Diana

I was born on a cold dark winter’s night, as perhaps befits my personality. The sun cheerfully came out to greet me; but my mum, a stickler for propriety, shooed it away in irritation, because it was the wrong time of day for the sun to be out; so it didn’t stay long. Unfortunately it was so intimidated by her attitude that it’s rarely come out since, and that’s why we normally have such cloudy weather in this country.

 

“When I was seven years old, I fell in love with a fruit fly and declared I wanted to marry it. A scientist friend of mine told me that would currently be impossible, at least if I wanted to have children with it, since humans and flies are too genetically dissimilar for that. But he offered to genetically modify us both to make us more like each other. He got to work immediately. The fly developed some impressive human characteristics, and grew spectacularly; but unfortunately, since he neglected to tinker with the genes that determined its life span, it died soon afterwards, since fruit flies only tend to live for weeks. I don’t know why he didn’t realise that would happen. But it meant the hours and hours of work he’d poured into the project were wasted.

 

“That didn’t deter him, however, and he carried on the genetic modifications on me for some time afterwards. I was too young at the time to think to question why he would bother doing that when there was no need for them any more.

 

“But I ended up with some remarkable fly-like characteristics. Unfortunately I was bullied a bit at school by people who thought they were weird. But when I left, I was heartened to discover that the wider community accepted me with no problem, many of them feeling sorry for me for looking so much like a fly, assuming it must have been caused by a rare birth defect, not realising it was the result of deliberate genetic modification when I was too young to know better.

 

“Thankfully, the genetic modifications didn’t affect the functioning of my brain - at least not to a large extent. So my brain’s still at least fairly human-like, so I’ve still been able to write my books. Some might say they’re a bit weird. But what can you expect when they were written by someone with a brain that’s part-fly, part-human?