[1] The son of a "peripatetic Navy family," his career-Navy-officer "Pearl-Harbor-survivor father and an underdog-championing anthropologist mother" raised Bruce and his younger brother, Jack, in Washington, D.C., Florida, California, and Italy.

...[A] week after the hand-shake we dropped over to see Mrs. Hemingway, who lived in a little beach house with palms and banana trees and who, though we didn't know her, was hospitable.

The family story was that their lineage on his father's side went "back to Robert the Bruce, supposedly, and laterally to Ben Franklin, or so they said...along with a Captain McAllister of the Confederate Army."

"[2] Another influential childhood memory was this: "As far as our father's world went, we had, on the Navy base where we lived in San Diego, the bathyscaphe submersible in our back yard (literally we would have played on it if we could have gotten a decent grip); a year later it would make the deepest dive in the Pacific ever made, with Jacques Piccard and a Navy diver and a civilian scientist—all of them diving legends if not then, then later)."

(Neilson commented in his essay about McAllister, "You can see where the themes of 'the alien' and 'the natural world'—the behavioral sciences and the biological sciences—came from in this guy's fiction.

Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren't lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library.

Answers ranged from the secretarial blow-off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.When Butler interviewed McAllister decades later, he remarked, "The conclusion I came to was that nobody had asked them.

Publishers Weekly wrote, "McAllister's first novel is a stunning tour de force... Masterful interior monologues that yield eerie, tingling tension make this terrifying novel one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam war.

"[6] Library Journal's reviewer said, "The training and the mission are suffused with madness, and the physical horrors are matched with mental ones.

"[7] In a review of The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, Ernest Lilley described the famous story "Kin": "a twelve-year-old boy is in the act... his 'partner' is an alien assassin he tries to hire to stop the government from killing his unborn sister.

The alternate universe is dazzling, but what sets this story above so many others is the true, honest, Christ-like character of the young Pope and how he deals with a boy who has been taken by the vampires.

'Stamps' is told in a minor key and concerns itself with aliens coming to Earth during the Cuban missile crisis in order to avert nuclear war.

To answer his father's question and hopefully bring him some peace, Tim travels back in time to meet his parents and see for himself.