by Ben Bova
Aliette de Bodard was born in New York City and now resides in Paris. She holds a master of science in applied mathematics and computer science and works as a systems engineer. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. She has won a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her latest work is the Vietnamese space opera novella On a Red Station Drifting. She blogs at www.AliettedeBodard.com, where she relates her struggles with writing and Vietnamese cooking.
The science in “A Slow Unfurling of Truth” is based on probabilities, and in particular on multidimensional density estimation, which aims to fit a vast series of observations to a complex model. It also touches on problems of robust authentication, which require independent sources to verify someone’s identity (in the story, an AI and a human).
Ben Bova is the author of more than 130 novels, story collections, and nonfiction books. President emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005 “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” His 2006 novel Titan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008, he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature,” and in 2012 he received a Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society. He has also won six Hugo Awards.
“Old Timer’s Game” is an examination of how breakthroughs in biomedical research will inevitably affect the performance of athletes in professional sports, and how professional sports will be forced to change as a result. As an eighty-some-year-old tennis player, he can hardly wait for the improvements!
Eric Choi was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Far Orbit, Rocket Science, The Astronaut from Wyoming and Other Stories, Footprints, Northwest Passages, Space Inc., Tales from the Wonder Zone, Northern Suns, Tesseracts6, Arrowdreams, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. With Derwin Mak, he coedited the Aurora Award–winning anthology The Dragon and the Stars, the first collection of science fiction and fantasy written by authors of the Chinese diaspora. An aerospace engineer by training, Eric has a bachelor’s degree in engineering science and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, both from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from York University. His Web site is at www.AerospaceWriter.ca and he can be followed on Twitter (@AerospaceWriter).
“She Just Looks that Way” was inspired by the research of Kevin Kniffin and David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University that examined the influence of nonphysical traits on perceptions of beauty. The story combines the author’s love of science, ultimate Frisbee, and Washington, DC.
David DeGraff teaches physics and astronomy at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. In addition to the usual classes in physics and astronomy, he has also taught classes on superheroes, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, science in science fiction, life in the universe, and the physics of snowboarding. His grandfather, with help from Captain Kirk and Neil Armstrong, taught him to love science and science fiction at an early age. After majoring in physics at St. Lawrence University, he received his PhD in astrophysics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His previously published fiction includes a short story in Polaris: Tales from the Wonder Zone, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. He has discovered three asteroids, of which two are named for colleagues (31113 Stull and 96344 Scott weaver) and one for his grandfather (152641 Fredreed).
Titan is a fascinating place, with a landscape of mountains, streams, rivers, and lakes. The liquid flowing there is a mixture of methane and ethane, while the water is a mineral locked into solid rock. Robotic exploration of alien worlds is frustratingly slow at the moment. It would be much more efficient if probes were more like “SIREN of Titan” and could make their own decisions.
Carl Frederick is theoretically a theoretical physicist. After a postdoc at NASA and a stint at Cornell University, he left astrophysics and his first love, stochastic space-time quantum relativity theory (a strange first love, perhaps), in favor of the hi-tech industry. He attended the 2000 Odyssey Writers Workshop and subsequently took a quarterly first place in the Writers of the Future contest. Although he has written novels, he considers himself predominately a short story writer. He has sold a couple of stories each to Asimov’s and Baen’s Universe and more elsewhere, and over forty to Analog. His Web site is at www.frithrik.com.
Relativity physicist that he is, the author has long felt ashamed of needing to invoke faster-than-light travel in his stories. So before writing “Ambiguous Nature,” he tried to come up with an FTL mechanism that would (arguably) not violate relativity theory. This story marks its first appearance, an idea he now calls the “stochastic trajectory drive.” He has since returned to his aforementioned first love.
Nancy Fulda is a Hugo and Nebula nominee, a Phobos Award winner, and a Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award recipient. She is the first (and so far only) female recipient of the Jim Baen Memorial Award. Nancy was born in Livermore, California, and resides with her husband and children in northern Germany. She holds a master’s degree in computer science and her graduate work in artificial intelligence has been presented at several IEEE conferences.
“Recollection” was inspired by current research into the role of tau malformations and beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. If a cure for Alzheimer’s is discovered, then recuperating dementia patients may face challenges like those portrayed in the story.
Gabrielle Harbowy is an editor for such SF publishers as Pyr, Circlet, and Dragon Moon Press, as well as coeditor of the award-nominated When the Hero Comes Home anthology series with Ed Greenwood. She has a degree in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and is a trained classical musician. Her short fiction has been a finalist for the Parsec Award and has appeared in such anthologies as Beast Within: 2, Metastasis, Cthulhurotica, and others. Gabrielle’s most recent publication is “Inheritance,” a shared-world story for Pathfinder Tales that is free to read at www.paizo.com. She can be found in real life in the San Francisco Bay Area and on the Internet at www.gabrielle-edits.com or on Twitter as @gabrielle_h.
“Skin Deep” was inspired by a number of recent scientific advancements, including an autonomous diagnostic and treatment “biocapsule” developed by Dr. David Loftus at the NASA Ames Research Center and a disease detecting skin patch invented by Dr. Michael McAlpine of Princeton University. Leah and Gabrielle’s story takes these new medical technologies and examines what happens when lifesaving advances meet the darker side of human nature.
Howard Hendrix was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and earned his BS in biology from Xavier University there. He earned his MA and PhD degrees from University of California, Riverside. Howard currently teaches English literature and writing at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of six novels and, after a long hiatus, has just finished his seventh. In 1985, he won a Writers of the Future Award and in 2010 won a Dwarf Stars Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. He is also a literary critic of science fiction, and was lead editor on Visions of Mars. With his wife, Laurel, he is currently editing The Encyclopedia of Mars.
Of the science in “Habilis,” Howard says, “I’ve long been fascinated by chirality, by the ‘handedness’ that prevails on scales ranging from the subatomic to the cosmic. That the human brain is also chiral, in many ways, just made this story all the more enjoyable to write.” His Web site is at www.HowardVHendrix.com and he can also sometimes be found on Facebook.
Liu Cixin was born in Beijing, China, and now resides in the city of Yangquan in Shanxi province, where he works as a senior engineer in the specialized field of power plant computing. Cixin’s first science fiction story was published in 1999. Since then, he has published seven novels and nine collections of short fict
ion as well as a number of critical essays. Between 1999 and 2006 his works won the Galaxy Award—China’s highest literary prize for speculative fiction—an unprecedented eight consecutive times. In 2012 he won the People’s Literature Short Story Award, and in 2013 he won the Chinese Writers Association’s Outstanding Children’s Literature Award. He maintains a blog (in Chinese) at blog.sina.com.cn/lcx.
In “The Circle,” which is based on a concept from his novel The Three-Body Problem, Cixin imagines a computing “machine” based on modern computer design principles but constructed from individual humans acting as logic gates. An English version of The Three-Body Problem translated by Hugo and Nebula winner Ken Liu was published by Tor in 2014.
Jack McDevitt has been described by Stephen King as “the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.” A Philadelphia native, Jack holds a master’s degree in literature and admits to being completely baffled by the quantum world. He is the author of twenty novels, eleven of which have been Nebula finalists. In all, he has been nominated seventeen times for the Nebula, which Seeker won in 2007. In 2003, Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel. He has received numerous other awards, and was most recently chosen by the Georgia Writers Association as Writer of the Year, given for lifetime achievement. A new novel, Starhawk, has just been released. His Web site is at www.JackMcDevitt.com.
Jack enjoys toying with issues that might arrive if our hardware starts becoming intelligent. That is at the heart of “The Play’s the Thing.”
Leah Petersen lives in North Carolina, manipulating numbers by day and the universe by night. She prides herself on being able to hold a book with her feet so she can knit while reading (she’s still working on knitting while writing). Her debut science fiction trilogy, the Physics of Falling series (Fighting Gravity, Cascade Effect, Impact Velocity) is available from Dragon Moon Press. You can find Leah online at www.LeahPetersen.com, on Twitter (@LeahPetersen), and at Facebook.com/LeahPetersenAuthor.
Robert Reed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, but his adult life has been largely spent down the road in Lincoln. The author of a sagan of short stories as well as a couple fistfuls of novels, Reed’s works have been nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards, and his novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo in 2007. Mostly self-taught in science, the man nonetheless has a BS in biology from Nebraska Wesleyan University plus some graduate classes at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, focusing on fossils and evolution. For fun, he reads science books and articles and runs long distances and boasts about his lost youth. A very nice Web site about the author can be found at www.robertreedwriter.com. Perhaps best known for his Great Ship series, his newest book is set in that universe. The Memory of Sky from Prime Books, released in March 2014, is a trilogy published in one back-crippling volume.
Bob is not eager to comment on the science in “Every Hill Ends with Sky,” mostly because what he feels to be the hard science is the miserable landscape and humanity eating itself whole. The aliens are more fanciful, by a long ways.
Kate Story is a writer and performer with a degree in cultural studies. Born and raised in Newfoundland, she presently lives in Peterborough, Ontario. Her first novel, Blasted (Killick Press, 2008), received honorable mention from the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and was long listed for the ReLit Awards. Wrecked Upon This Shore is her second novel, and she is currently working on a young-adult fantasy novel called Antilia.
“The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars” was inspired by Kate’s early training in ballet and contemporary dance. She is interested in technologies that could function as a hardware/wetware collaboration. Environmental and political concerns also form one of the foundations for the story, as does a love of literature. Please visit her Web site at www.katestory.com.
Dirk Strasser was born in Offenbach, Germany, but has lived most of his life in Melbourne, Australia. He has written more than thirty books for major publishers in Australia and has been editing SF anthologies and magazines, including Aurealis—Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction for over twenty years. Dirk has won multiple Australian Publisher Association Awards and a Ditmar for Best Professional Achievement, and his The Books of Ascension trilogy—Zenith, Equinox, and Eclipse—was recently published by Macmillan Momentum. His story “The Doppelgänger Effect” appeared in the World Fantasy Award–winning anthology Dreaming Down Under.
At university, Dirk studied pure mathematics, statistics, German literature, and history. “The Mandelbrot Bet” is his attempt to write the ultimate hard SF time-travel love story, where non-Gaussian randomness, probability theory, and cosmology combine to save the universe. His Web site is at www.dirkstrasser.com.
Born in Toronto, Jean-Louis Trudel now lives in Québec City, Canada. He holds degrees in physics, astronomy, and the history of science, capping his education with a doctorate in history. Jean-Louis now teaches history part-time at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of twenty-eight books in French, including novels, collections, and YA fiction, one anthology in English (Tesseracts7), and more than one hundred short stories in French and English. His publications have won him several Aurora and Boréal Awards. He also writes with Yves Meynard under the name Laurent McAllister, accounting for five more books and a handful of short stories. Their 2009 novel Suprématie won plaudits, nominations, and Canada’s top science fiction awards.
On “The Snows of Yesteryear,” Jean-Louis says, “What lies under Greenland’s ice sheet is a truly alien land, untouched for thousands and even millions of years, hiding the last remnants of a distant past and of an equally remote environment predating modern humans. Climate change is now acting as a gigantic time machine by reverting Greenland to its earlier state.” His blog is at culturedesfuturs.blogspot.com and you can find him on Facebook.
Daniel H. Wilson is the New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse as well as eight other books, including Amped, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and Robogenesis. He earned a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University as well as master’s degrees in robotics and artificial intelligence.
“The Blue Afternoon that Lasted Forever” draws on the expertise of childhood friend and physicist Dr. Mark Baumann at the University of Texas at Austin. The rest of the story happened naturally, as a result of Daniel having both a scientific mind and a three-year-old daughter. Daniel grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and now lives in Portland, Oregon. You can learn more about him at www.danielhwilson.com or talk to him on Twitter @danielwilsonPDX.
TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA
Able One
The Aftermath
As on a Darkling Plain
The Astral Mirror
Battle Station
The Best of the Nebulas
(editor)
Challenges
Colony
Cyberbooks
Escape Plus
The Green Trap
Gremlins Go Home
(with Gordon R. Dickson)
Jupiter
The Kinsman Saga
Leviathans of Jupiter
Mars Life
Mercury
The Multiple Man
Orion
Orion Among the Stars
Orion and King Arthur
Orion and the Conqueror
Orion in the Dying Time
Out of the Sun
The Peacekeepers
BOOKS BY ERIC CHOI
The Dragon and the Stars (coeditor with Derwin Mak)
Power Play
Powersat
The Precipice
Privateers
The Prometheans
The Rock Rats
Saturn
The Silent War
Star Peace
The Starcrossed
Tales of the Grand Tour
Test of Fire
Titan
To Fear The Light
(with A. J. Austin)
To Save the Sun
(with A. J. Austin)
The Trikon D
eception
(with Bill Pogue)
Triumph
Vengeance of Orion
Venus
Voyagers
Voyagers II: The Alien Within
Voyagers III: Star Brothers
The Return: Book IV of Voyagers
The Winds of Altair
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Ben Bova is the author of more than 130 novels, story collections, and nonfiction books. President emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005 “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” His 2006 novel Titan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008, he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature,” and in 2012 he received a Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society. He has also won six Hugo Awards.
Visit him on the Web at www.benbova.com.
Eric Choi was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Far Orbit, Rocket Science, The Astronaut from Wyoming and Other Stories, Footprints, Northwest Passages, Space Inc., Tales from the Wonder Zone, Northern Suns, Tesseracts6, Arrowdreams, Science Fiction Age, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. With Derwin Mak, he coedited the Aurora Award–winning anthology The Dragon and the Stars, the first collection of science fiction and fantasy written by authors of the Chinese diaspora. An aerospace engineer by training, Eric has worked on a number of space missions, including the Phoenix Mars Lander, the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, the RADARSAT-1 Earth-observation satellite, and the MOPITT instrument on the Terra satellite.
