Dr. Grazier is also currently the Science Advisor for the animated educational TV series The Zula Patrol, and for the SciFi Channel series Eureka and Battlestar Galactica. He recently served as editor and contributing author for the books The Science of Dune and the Science of Michael Crichton for the BenBella Publishing Science of Popular Culture series.
Ges Seger
Ges Seger was born in Quincy, Illinois in 1962. Raised in Danville, Indiana, he graduated from Purdue University in 1984 with a BS in Physics and the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1989 with a MS in Engineering Physics. He is currently employed at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio as a webmaster and Perl hacker.
He is the author of the novel The Once and Future War, and was a contributing author for The Science of Dune.
His after-work duties as family soccer mom, combined with the discovery of a latent talent for Irish Step Dancing basically leaves him no time for anything in the way of meaningful hobbies.
Mary Robinette Kowal
Jaiden’s Weaver
Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Subterranean. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in NYC with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, will be published by Tor in 2010. To learn more about the author, visit: http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com
G. David Nordley
The Touch
Gerald was born in Minneapolis MN in 1947 and was raised in suburban Golden Valley, MN attending Golden Valley High School. He originally intended to be an astronomer and majored in physics at Macalester College, in St. Paul, MN with that in mind. But, faced with the reality of the draft after graduation, he joined the US Air Force as an airman basic in 1969. He gained a reserve commission as a second lieutenant in1970, and surprised himself by staying for a career.
He spent some time in radar intercept control and battle management, including tours in Alaska and Korea, but worked mainly as an astronautical engineer, managing satellite operations, engineering, and advanced propulsion research. In the latter capacity, he met and became inspired to write by physicist and author Dr. Robert L. Forward. He retired as a major at the end of 1989 and began submitting stories in 1990, using the "G. David" form of his name for fiction (though lately it has migrated to articles as well) and Gerald D. for technical papers, the intent being to separate the work in computer author searches.
As a writer, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focus on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. Trying to keep up with just what is plausible is a challenge, but he recycles his research for occasional nonfiction articles. He continues to write a few pieces of short fiction each year, but is currently concentrating on novels, with three complete books looking for publishers and two more in serious production efforts. After the Vikings, a collection of linked Mars-related stories was published as an electronic book by Scorpius Digital in September 2001, with a print version appearing in 2003 (which is currently sold out). The Black Hole Project, a novel in five parts written with C. Sanford Lowe, was published as a series in Analog in 2006-2007. He is a four-time winner of the AnLab, the Analog reader's award for best story or article of the year, and has also been a Hugo and Nebula award nominee.
Besides writing, he consults in astronautical engineering, dabbles in real estate, and among other volunteer activities is the treasurer of CONTACT, Cultures of the Imagination, an interdisciplinary educational group concerned with issues related to the development of intelligent life — from raw planets to expansion into space. He is a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society; senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a signatory of the Invitation to ETI, and a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives in Sunnyvale CA with his wife, Gayle Wiesner, a retired Apple Computer programmer.
You can learn more about him, his fiction and nonfiction by visiting his website at: www.gdnordley.com
Gerald M. Weinberg
The Moon is a Harsh Pig
Gerald M. Weinberg (Jerry) writes "nerd novels," such as The Aremac Project, about how brilliant people produce quality work. Before taking up his science fiction career, he published books on human behavior, including Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method, The Psychology of Computer Programming and an Introduction to General Systems Thinking. He also wrote books on leadership including Becoming a Technical Leader, The Secrets of Consulting (Foreword by Virginia Satir), More Secrets of Consulting, and the four-volume Quality Software Management series. He incorporates his knowledge of science, engineering, and human behavior into all of his writing and consulting work (with writers, hi-tech researchers, and software engineers).
Early in his career, he was the architect for the Mercury Project's space tracking network and designer of the world's first multiprogrammed operating system. Winner of the Warnier Prize and the Stevens Award for his writing on software quality, he is also a charter member of the Computing Hall of Fame in San Diego and the University of Nebraska Hall of Fame. His website and blogs may be found at:
http://www.geraldmweinberg.com
David Levine
Galactic Stress
David D. Levine is a lifelong science fiction reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 (Best Short Story, for “Tk'Tk'Tk”). His “Titanium Mike Saves the Day” was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2008, and a collection of his short stories, “Space Magic”, is available from Wheatland Press (http://www.wheatlandpress.com). He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento, and their website is at http://www.BentoPress.com.
Wil McCarthy
The Freshmen Hook Up
Wil McCarthy has served as a consultant in a variety of areas. Creative consulting includes: personal and professional editing, continuity and fact checking, web content creation, graphic novel and dramatic scripts, science advice, and the writing of creative fiction and nonfiction. Technical consulting includes proposal writing, software engineering, LAN setup and security, robotics, Artificial Intelligence/Artificial Life, guidance/navigation/control, systems engineering/troubleshooting, and space science/spacecraft design. You can learn more about him and his novels by visiting his website: http://www.wilmccarthy.com
Alma Alexander
End of the World
Alma Alexander is a Pacific Northwest writer known primarily for her longer, novel-length works ("The Secrets of Jin Shei", "The Hidden Queen", "Changer of Days", the YA Worldweavers trilogy) — and has hitherto been leaning more towards the fantasy side of the speculative fiction spectrum — however, as an alumna of the 2008 LaunchPad astronomy workshop for writers she has been energized and inspired to write both shorter fiction and more cutting-edge SF.
Alma's website can be found at www.AlmaAlexander.com
Jerry Oltion
In The Autumn of the Empire
Jerry Oltion is the author of over 100 short stories and 15 novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres. He is also an avid amateur astronomer and telescope builder, designing a new type of telescope mount that he calls the "trackball." Details can be found on his website: www.sff.net/people/j.oltion
Mike Brotherton
The Point
When Mike was six, he wanted to be an astronomer or a paleontologist. When he was twelve he wanted to be a science fiction writer. He went to college at Rice University intending to get a degree in electrical engineering and work for JPL or NASA. He ended up double majoring in EE and space physics and went on to the University o
f Texas at Austin to study astronomy. After getting his PhD in 1996, he worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Kitt Peak National Observatory. He’s now an associate professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming; his specialty is quasars. He’s actually used the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Keck Telescope and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. He has two hard science fiction novels out from Tor. Star Dragon was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. Spider Star features a dark matter planet. You can learn more about Mike at http://www.mikebrotherton.com.
About the Book
Diamonds in the Sky is a collection of astronomy-based science fiction stories edited by Mike Brotherton and funded under his National Science Foundation grant AST 05-07781. The purpose of the anthology is to provide stories with ample and accurate astronomy spanning a range of topics covered in introductory courses. Instructors in high school and college may these stories useful, as some students may learn concepts more easily through story than from lecture. Fans of science fiction with good science should also enjoy these stories. Contributions include both original stories and reprints from some of the top science fiction writers working today. Special thanks to Jeremy Tolbert, Scott Humphries, and Nicole Wade for their efforts.
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