AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Griffin Barber spent his youth in four different countries, learning three languages, and burning all his bridges. Finally settled in Northern California and retired from a day job as a police officer in a major metropolitan department, he lives the good life with his lovely wife, crazy-smart daughter, and tiny Bengal rescue. 1636: Mission to the Mughals, coauthored with Eric Flint, was his first novel. 1637: The Peacock Throne is now available. He’s also collaborated on a number of projects with Kacey Ezell, writing Second Chance Angel with her. Griffin has also penned Man-Eater and Infiltration, novellas set in The Murphy’s Lawless annex of Charles Gannon’s Caine Riordan Universe. He has a number of short stories coming out in various anthologies for 2022–23.
D.J. (Dave) Butler has been a lawyer, a consultant, an editor, a corporate trainer, and a registered investment banking representative. His novels published by Baen Books include Witchy Eye, Witchy Winter, and Witchy Kingdom, and In the Palace of Shadow and Joy, as well as The Cunning Man and The Jupiter Knife, cowritten with Aaron Michael Ritchey. He also writes for children: The steampunk fantasy adventure tales The Kidnap Plot, The Giant’s Seat, and The Library Machine are published by Knopf. Other novels include City of the Saints from WordFire Press and The Wilding Probate from Immortal Works. Dave also organizes writing retreats and anarcho-libertarian writers’ events and travels the country to sell books. He plays guitar and banjo whenever he can and likes to hang out in Utah with his wife and children.
Jessica Cain is a longtime fan of everything strange and otherworldly. By day, she works for tech companies creating content for digital platforms. By night, she consumes way too much coffee and tea while typing out her stories. She’s known to frequent graveyards for a little inspiration and she’s also a demon at pub trivia. Some think she might actually be a demon, but they just need to get to know her better. She lives in New York, where she’s currently hard at work on her first novel.
Erica Ciko’s stories have appeared in many eerie and enchanting venues, most recently Mythic, Cosmic Horror Monthly and Tales to Terrify. She’s the editor-in-chief of Starward Shadows Quarterly and a proud active member of the SFWA. She’s also currently writing the Tales of a Starless Aeon novel series: If you haven’t heard of it, you will soon. If you’re still craving the whispers of war-torn, dead galaxies in the meantime, check out her website: starless-imperium.com. You can also find her on Twitter at @TheLastGrimKing.
Orson Scott Card is the author of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, which won two of his four Hugo Awards. His other books include The Lost Gate, Pathfinder, Lost and Found, and The Tales of Alvin Maker.
Card began as a poet and playwright, but in his mid-twenties began publishing fiction. He also served as a missionary in urban Brazil for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Card and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of three adult children who have provided seven grandchildren. The Cards live in Greensboro NC, because if you can live in Greensboro, why would you live anywhere else?
Patrick Chiles has been fascinated by aircraft, rockets, and spaceflight ever since he was a child transfixed by the Apollo missions. How he ended up as an English major in college is still a mystery, though he managed to overcome this to pursue a career in aviation operations and safety management.
He is a graduate of The Citadel, a Marine Corps veteran, and a private pilot. In addition to his novels, he has written for magazines such as Smithsonian’s Air & Space. He currently resides in Tennessee with his wife and two lethargic dachshunds.
Jonathan Edelstein has been writing stories since he was four but became a published author only at the age of forty. His first published story—“Four Sacrifices,” a supernatural tale set in Minoan Crete—appeared in the Lacuna Journal in 2012, and since then, he is the author of nineteen other science fiction and fantasy stories appearing in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies. Most recently, his short story “Lightning Cat” appeared in Felis Futura, an anthology of future cat stories.
Edelstein’s inspirations come from an eclectic collection of sources: ancient history and modern physics, medieval Jewish scholarship and southern African cosmology, the alleys of New York City and the streets of Lagos, the towers of the future and the ruins of the past. His literary heroes are equally eclectic, ranging from Chinua Achebe to Ursula Le Guin to Bernard Cornwell.
Edelstein was born in New York City and has lived in and around there all his life with the exception of boot camp. He currently lives in Queens with his wife Naomi and their cat Maya. When he isn’t writing, he practices law and hopes one day to get it right.
Sean Patrick Hazlett is an Army veteran, speculative fiction writer and editor, and finance executive in the San Francisco Bay area. He holds an AB in history and BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where he won the 2006 Policy Analysis Exercise Award for his work on policy solutions to Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the guidance of future secretary of defense Ashton B. Carter. He also holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School, where he graduated with Second Year Honors. As a cavalry officer serving in the elite 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, he trained various Army and Marine Corps units for war in Iraq and Afghanistan. While at the Army’s National Training Center, he became an expert in Soviet doctrine and tactics. He has also published a Harvard Business School case study on the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and how it exemplified a learning organization.
Sean is a 2017 winner of the Writers of the Future Contest. Over forty of his short stories have appeared in publications such as The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Terraform, Galaxy’s Edge, Writers of the Future, Grimdark Magazine, Vastarien, and Abyss & Apex, among others.
He is the editor of the Weird World War III anthology. Sean also teaches strategy, finance, and communications as a course facilitator at the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Executive Education Program. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and Codex Writers’ Group.
Les Johnson is a husband, father, physicist, and author. Publisher’s Weekly noted that “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well . . .” when describing his 2018 novel, Mission to Methone. Les is the coauthor of the Saving Proxima series with Travis Taylor and Rescue Mode with Ben Bova, as well as The Spacetime War and others from Baen Books. He is the coeditor of the science/science fiction collections Stellaris and Going Interstellar. His next non-fiction book, A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars, will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2022. Les was technical consultant for the movies Europa Report and Lost in Space and has appeared on the Discovery Channel series, Physics of the Impossible in the “How to Build a Starship” episode. He has also appeared in three episodes of the Science Channel series Exodus Earth as well as several other television documentaries. Les was the featured “interstellar explorer” in the January 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine and appeared again the March 2019 issue for his work on solar sail space propulsion.
By day, Les serves as Solar Sail Principal Investigator of NASA’s first interplanetary solar sail space mission, Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, and leads research on various other advanced space propulsion technologies at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. During his career at NASA, he served as the Manager for the Space Science Programs and Projects Office, the In-Space Propulsion Technology Program, and the Interstellar Propulsion Research Project. Les thrice received NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal, has three patents, and was selected for membership in Mensa.
Sean CW Korsgaard is a U.S. Army veteran, historian, award-winning journalist, and an editor at Baen Books.
As a reporter, he’s had over fifteen hundred articles published across dozens of newspapers in Virginia over the past seven years, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Daily Press, and nationally, in outlets ranging from The New York Times to io9 to VFW Magazine, and most recently, as a guest columnist for Analog Science Fiction & Fact.
His work has seen him interview two U.S. Presidents, walk the grounds of Auschwitz beside Holocaust survivors, party with Swedish metal bands, caught in the thick of riots, and even attacked by a shark. Though previously a finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award and Writers of the Future, Worlds Long Lost contains his first published work of fiction.
Sean lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife, Suzy, and is always looking for his next great adventure and his next big byline, and you can follow him and his work at www.korsgaardscommentary.com, or on Twitter @SCWKorsgaard.
Of Scottish and Nigerian descent, Adam Oyebanji is an escapee from Birmingham University and Harvard Law School. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA with a wife, child, and two embarrassingly large dogs. When he’s not out among the stars, Adam works in the field of counter-terrorist financing: helping banks choke off the money supply that builds weapons of mass destruction, narcotics empires, and human trafficking networks. Braking Day (forthcoming from DAW Books, April 2022) will be his first novel.
Gray Rinehart writes science fiction and fantasy stories, songs, and . . . other things. He is the only person to have commanded an Air Force satellite tracking station, written speeches for presidential appointees, devised a poetic form, and had music on The Dr. Demento Show. He is currently a contributing editor (the “Slushmaster General”) for Baen Books.
Gray is the author of the lunar colonization novel Walking on the Sea of Clouds (WordFire Press), and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and multiple anthologies. As a singer/songwriter, he has two albums of mostly science-fiction-and-fantasy-inspired music. During his unusual USAF career, Gray fought rocket propellant fires, refurbished space launch facilities, “flew” Milstar satellites, drove trucks, encrypted nuclear command and control orders, commanded the largest remote tracking station in the Air Force Satellite Control Network, and did other interesting things. His alter ego is the Gray Man, one of several famed ghosts of South Carolina’s Grand Strand, and his web site is graymanwrites.com.
USA TODAY bestselling author, M.A. Rothman, has always been a creative type with a strong background in science and math. He’s used those strengths to great effect in Silicon Valley over a thirty-plus-year career; yet if you polled his former English teachers, asking them if they expected him to become a novelist, they’d all laugh hysterically and say, “No.”
More than a few handful of years ago he had kids, and the bedtime stories began flowing. From these stories bloomed an accidental writing career. As a well-traveled engineer, with a strong background in the sciences, this accidental novelist began writing stories that focused on two things: technology and international intrigue.
His writing spans the genres of science fiction, techno-thriller, and his own unique spin on LitRPG. When not writing, he enjoys cooking, learning about new technology, travel, and spending time with his family.
Christopher Ruocchio is the internationally award-winning author of The Sun Eater, a space opera fantasy series, and the former junior editor at Baen Books, where he edited several anthologies. His work has also appeared in Marvel Comics. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University, where he studied English Rhetoric and the Classics. Christopher has been writing since he was eight and sold his first novel, Empire of Silence, at twenty-two. His books have appeared in five languages.
Christopher lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Jenna.
Brian Trent’s work regularly appears in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, The Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF, Terraform, Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Apex, Pseudopod, Escape Pod, Galaxy’s Edge, Nature, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. The author of the sci-fi novels Redspace Rising and Ten Thousand Thunders, Trent is a winner of the 2019 Year’s Best Military and Adventure SF Readers’ Choice Award from Baen Books and a Writers of the Future winner. He is also a contributor to Baen anthologies Weird World War III, Weird World War IV, Weird World War China, Cosmic Corsairs, and the Black Tide Rising anthologies We Shall Rise and United We Stand. Trent lives in New England. His website and blog are at www.briantrent.com.
David J. West writes weird westerns and pulp fantasy (sometimes under the nom de plume James Alderdice) all because the voices in his head won’t quiet until someone else can hear them. He is a great fan of sword & sorcery, ghosts and lost ruins, so of course he lives in Utah with his wife and children. You can find him most anywhere online but he is most likely to be chatty on twitter @David_JWest.