Success Quote by George Stephen

There is a quiet self-mythology in the way Stephen frames his origin story: not as a born genius, not as a credentialed man of letters, but as a teenager who fell hard for SF and never quite came back. The line’s power sits in its modesty. “Got into” sounds casual, almost accidental, while “quite heavily” admits obsession without bragging. He’s smuggling in a claim about formation: that reading is not an ornament you acquire later, but an early-world exposure that rewires your sense of what’s plausible.

Coming from a businessman, the subtext sharpens. SF becomes a socially acceptable explanation for how a person steeped in trade can justify imaginative reach. It’s an alibi and a bridge: the habits of forecasting, systems-thinking, and speculative risk that business celebrates are recast as literary instincts. He’s also quietly resisting the old hierarchy that treats “serious” writing as the product of elite schooling. Instead, the engine is genre, appetite, fandom - the democratic pipeline of cheap magazines, circulating libraries, and adolescent binge-reading.

Context matters: for someone born in 1829, “SF” likely points less to spaceship futurism and more to the proto-scientific romances and industrial-era speculation that rode alongside Victorian confidence and anxiety. Adolescence, then, isn’t just a life stage; it’s a cultural moment when technology was visibly remaking daily life. His intent is to tell you that his imagination learned to think in futures early - and that this, not boardroom polish, is what shaped the way he writes.