The inspiration for Warriors From Pluto originally came from a suggestion that I write an eighth movement for Gustav Holst's orchestral suite The Planets, which had been composed before Pluto's discovery. Just after I began, I found out that the English composer Colin Matthews had been commissioned to write a "Pluto" for the same reason, and that this was currently being premiered in Britain. So I decided to change the focus of the piece; instead of an Earthling's view of what Pluto might be like, this is a Plutan's vision of the planet Earth. After extensive research, I discovered that the Plutan idea of the space age is alarmingly similar to that of the Earth, circa 1953. Everything looks fabulous, but aesthetics have an absolute priority over practicality. This is perhaps why, although they have known about Earth for several millennia, it has taken the Plutans until now to get a spacecraft here without crashing it into one of those pesky asteroidal lamp-posts.
