Barton Paul Levenson (born May 9, 1960) is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and the macabre. He is author of eight novels and over 80 short stories, articles, reviews and other publications. Background Levenson was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He started writing in 1974. He is a 1983 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh He became a Christian in 1984. His first work of fiction was a short story, "Twenty Peasants", published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine in 1991. Levenson is a two-time winner of the "Confluence Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story Contest" for "Virtual Bridges" and "Reality Forbidden". He is a long-standing member of one of Pittsburgh's oldest science-fiction and fantasy writer's workshops, Carnegie-Mellon University-based Pittsburgh Worldwrights, which includes Pittsburgh science fiction writer Kenneth Chiacchia among its members. He is a former member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Levenson's first separate novel in paperback format, I Will, was released in June 2010. One of Levenson's characters, Khuminay, returned in "Khuminay and the Servant" in Cosmic Crime Stories and "Khuminay and the Axe-Wielding Psycho", which appeared in Electric Spec. This followed his novel Year of the Human. Style Reviewers consider Levenson's writing complex. It is often in the first-person and it sometimes takes on other genders or species. Levenson's works often contain Christian parables, cat-like aliens and complex scientific concepts. Levenson's focus on science fiction started when he was eight years old, when his parents took him to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey He described his writing process in a 2010 interview with author Sonya Clark, stating that he starts writing with either a broad plot outline in mind, or even one daydreamed scene. Often, the process will fail and the result is an incomplete work. His work is inspired by authors ranging from C.S. Lewis to Edgar Allan Poe. In "The Closet" Chiaroscuro, 2003, humankind's unwillingness to accept the consequences of their own choices is examined. Several of his stories are based in Pittsburgh, often in different eras. For example; in "The Boogie-Woogie, Time-Traveling, Cyborg Blues", Pittsburgh in the 1930s is the back-drop. Controversy One of Levenson's most cited essays, "The Ideology of Robert A. Heinlein" has been reprinted in several languages (See Essays below). Levenson argues that Heinlein was making a case for the value of fascism. Levenson has been writing about climate issues for many years.