Candace Uhlmeyer was born in Lone Pine, California, in 1947. Shortly thereafter, her father (who had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II) enlisted in the newly-formed United States Air Force. During his twenty three-year career as a non-commissioned officer, he participated in the Korean conflict and the Viet Nam War. He took his family with him on tours of Bermuda, Japan, and Taiwan, and later (after she graduated from high school) to Hawaii. This exposure to different cultures and landscapes fostered in his eldest child a lifelong affection for "alternative worlds" and especially for Asian philosophy and aesthetics.
Her educational background is already included in her introductory essay. She earned a B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania, where she concocted an independent major in ancient history (with an undeclared minor in geology) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1975 (nearly nine years after graduating from high school, and initially matriculating at the University of California at Riverside). She also studied ancient history, geology, and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook before finally settling down into the intellectual history program at the University of Texas at Dallas. She earned her M.A. in the History of Ideas in 1989, and passed her Ph.D. exams in 1992. Much of the research that underpins this novel comes from working on a dissertation on William Morris's philosophy of technology. At some point after that, she abandoned the quest for a doctorate because it was more fun to teach, create websites, and pursue whatever interests arose out of a continuous process of teaching and learning than it was to slog away at a dissertation.
Her choice to publish the results of her research as a novel, and to do so online, came about as she worked through the ideas William Morris had articulated over a century ago. It seemed only appropriate that because she mined his ideas so liberally in her effort to create a twenty first-century utopia, she should gain nothing from doing so other than to participate in an ongoing conversation, one he initiated in the first place. This conversation has continued since her retirement from teaching in 1916, and the online publication of the revised version is designed to update discussions in light of recent events.
"Owlfarmer," by the way, is simply a translation of a German homonym of the family name. Her father suggested using it when she first began to mess about on the web, and she's been playing with it ever since.
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