Mark Dean Stratus was born in the United States of America shortly after the dawn of the American manned space program. As a child, he watched the Gemini and Apollo program launches. The first steps on the Moon Luna by Neil Armstrong and 'Buzz' Aldrin were seared into his memory. He attended leading universities in the United States, where he became fascinated by both physics and the biological sciences. After a few years' detour as a software engineer, he went on to complete a PhD in biophysics and pursued years of research, primarily in drug discovery.

Stratus witnessed the height of the Cold War, the unexpected demise of the Soviet Union, its predictable replacement with a new dictatorship that aspired to the old glory of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China as a leading economic and military power.

Now, the world is back to dreaming of space colonization, and a new generation of idealists in the West are enamored with the kind of thinking (anti-capitalism and centralized authoritarian government) that gave rise to the totalitarian regimes of old...and new. It's against this backdrop that the Fate of Men space opera is set.