RENAISSANCE MAN.(Leonardo da Vinci)

When I was a teen-ager, I wrote a science-fiction story about Leonardo da Vinci. In it, a young art historian becomes fascinated with Leonardo's otherworldly paintings, with their strange rocky backgrounds, unplaceable landscapes, and enigmatic not-quite-human saints, their single fingers forever pointing strangely upward. To make a long, and rather shamelessly Rod Serlingish, story short, the art historian eventually discovers, in a previously unknown codex, that Leonardo was an alien, that the rocks were the landscape of his native planet, and that the fingers were pointing longingly back home.

Sensing, sadly but with characteristic prescience, that the market ...