Mealing, PP

Paul Mealing lives in Melbourne and, when he is not writing and philosophising, he works as a project controls engineer in the construction industry. His background has been varied and includes share farming in the mallee of NSW and amateur theatre in Canberra. His interests include science, religion and philosophy. He started writing fiction and screenplays in the 1980s, but Elvene is his first published novel. He had stopped writing altogether, but, during an overseas assignment in the US , he got the idea for Elvene while watching a trailer on a video, which had a female protagonist in a Sci-fi anime. He later acknowledged an influence from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 cult classic, Ghost in the Shell (not the trailer or the video he was watching at the time), which, going by an endorsement on the DVD, may have also inspired James Cameron's Dark Angel series. In a radio interview he relayed the story as, 'It was like I was pregnant with a story, only I didn't know it.;