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Mark Roman has been working his way through the alphabet in search of a suitable career. He’s sampled architecture, accountancy, auditing and astrophysics. For a while he worked as a computer programmer before realizing he’d skipped over ‘B’. So he took up bioinformatics, which is where he is now. He worries that becoming an author would put him back to ‘A’, with the whole alphabet still stretching out ahead of him.
He lives in London with his wife (also a scientist) and two young children, neither of whom wants to become a scientist. In his work he has published around 80 papers, reviews and book chapters - although, if you want to read them, you’ll need to look under a different name.
As a lifelong soccer fan he is no stranger to the extreme emotions of elation and despair (but mainly despair - in fact, almost entirely despair), particularly from his own performances on the football field. Still, he firmly believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved by a nice cup of tea. Except, perhaps, global warming.
Reviewed by Jennifer Reinoehl for Readers' Favorite
"The Ultimate Inferior Beings" is an enchanting science-fiction comedy by Mark Roman. When a ship lands ahead of schedule at the human colony Tenalp, the sole survivor whispers something inaudible to the leader of the colony. In an effort to discover the reason behind the ship’s fate, four brave souls and one stowaway are sent on a mission to determine what happened. However, the people chosen for the mission seem to have been randomly drawn from a lottery. The Captain has previously flown a ship only on his father’s knee as a child, the gynecologist is the only official female crew-member, the carpenter has never built anything out of real wood, and the atheist behavioral chemist is busy using anagrams to prove the existence of God. In fact, apart from the two ship computers, BUF and LEP, the only competent person to man (or in this case woman) the ship is the stowaway. Their trip allows them to meet an alien race and ultimately determine the fate of the universe or perhaps I should say, “uniferse.”
The plot was interesting and kept me reading. The story is dealt with in a lighthearted manner and is clean enough to share with teenagers and young adults. Unlike some stories that leave loose ends, this one seems to wrap everything up well. Although it is lighthearted, it is not quite up to the level of Douglas Adams. However, I liked it much better than "And Another Thing". There is also a glossary, index and appendixes for those looking for further reading.
