About the Editor and Authors
Jason Cordova is both a John W. Campbell Award and Dragon Award finalist, and is the creator of the Kin Wars series, which contains Wraithkin, Darkling, Deathlords, and Homeguard. He is also coauthoring Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever with Larry Correia, coming soon from Baen Books. He has written over a dozen novels and been featured in many anthologies. A Navy veteran, he is also a former middle school teacher. Though Californian by birth, he has since relocated to the South, where he swears at the humidity on a thrice-daily basis. He can be found at www.jasoncordova.com.
SF convention favorites Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have been collaborating since the 1980s. Together, they have written nearly one hundred works of fantastic fiction, much of it in their extensive space opera geography, the Liaden Universe®. Sharon was consecutively executive director, vice president, and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, while Steve was founding curator of science fiction at the University of Maryland’s Science Fiction Research Collection. Fair Trade, the twenty-fourth Liaden Universe® novel, was published in Spring 2022. Lee and Miller’s awards include the Skylark, the Prism, and the Hal Clement Award for Young Adult Science Fiction. More information and news can be found at www.korval.com and www.facebook.com/groups/
16280839259.
Kevin Ikenberry is a lifelong space geek and retired Army officer. As an adult, he managed the US Space Camp program and served in space operations before Space Force was a thing. He’s an international best-selling author, award finalist, and a core author in the wildly successful Four Horsemen Universe. His novels include Sleeper Protocol, Vendetta Protocol, Runs in the Family, Peacemaker, Honor the Threat, Stand or Fall, Deathangel, Fields of Fire, Harbinger, and the alternate history novel The Crossing. He’s cowritten both novels and short fiction with amazing authors. He is an Active Member of SFWA, International Thriller Writers, and SIGMA—the science fiction think tank. You can find Kevin online at www.kevinikenberry.com.
Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” When not engaged upon this worthy occupation, she writes fantasy and science fiction. Since 1987 she has published over 50 books and more than 170 short stories. She has also written with notables in the industry, including Anne McCaffrey and Robert Asprin. Jody teaches writing seminars at SF conventions, and is a judge for the Writers of the Future Contest.
The Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn’t run fast enough to get away.
Dave returned to become Chapel Hill’s assistant town attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.
Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His best-selling Hammer’s Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.
Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.
A.C. Haskins is a former armored cavalry officer and combat veteran turned economist and business strategist (and occasional firearm instructor). His debut novel, Blood and Whispers, was published by Baen Books. He has a lifelong love of speculative fiction, having written his first science fiction novel as a class project in the eleventh grade. His interests include (but are not limited to) ancient and medieval history, mythology, applied violence studies, tabletop gaming, and theoretical economics. He lives in Michigan with his wife, two cats, and a dog.
Joelle Presby is a former United States naval officer who has endured hurricane flooding of her Norfolk, Virginia, home multiple times. She has never garaged a hobby tank in the shed behind her house, and if someone says she did, the homeowners’ association can’t prove it.
She cowrote The Road to Hell (a Multiverse novel) with David Weber and has written short stories in her own universes and multiple shared universes. Her debut solo novel, Dabare Snake Launcher, was published by Baen Books in late 2022. Updates and releases are shared on her website, www.joellepresby.com, and on social media.
G. Scott Huggins, the first writer to win both the fantasy and the science-fiction short story writing awards from Baen Books, secures the future of the world by teaching its past to high-schoolers, many of whom learn things before they go to college. He loves high fantasy, space opera, and parodies of the same. Huggins has been writing since the late twentieth century, enjoys swords, venison, whiskey, and pie, and currently lives in Racine, WI, with his wife, three children, and two cats.
Award-winning and USA Today best-selling author of snark-filled adventures Lydia Sherrer is the author of the Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus Universe books: tales of an introverted wizard, a troublemaking witch, and a magical talking cat. She is currently writing a sci-fi gamelit trilogy with New York Times best-selling author John Ringo. Her work appears in several anthologies, including the latest Black Tide Rising anthology, We Shall Rise. Her first novel, Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Beginnings, won the best in Urban Fantasy 2017 Imadjin award, while her short story “Ashes of Hope,” a postapocalyptic tale of survival, won a place in Almond Press’s 2015 short story contest, received the 2017 Imadjin Best Short Story award, and was selected for Honorable Mention in the 2019 Writers of the Future 4th Quarter contest.
David Sherrer is a born storyteller and has been an obsessive gamer ever since he was seduced by Magic: The Gathering at the tender age of fourteen. He has alternately owned a gaming store, street-performed for a living, and survived eleven years in the soul-crushing world of telecommunications. He lucked out by marrying a force of nature (otherwise known as his wife) determined to making living off writing, and has since escaped his nine-to-five to become the marketing director and lead game designer of Chenoweth Press.
His most fond achievements include being Time magazine Person of the Year in 2006 and becoming a Scottish Lord—there’s a story there, just ask him. David considers himself an Atlantan, but currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his family, feline overlords, and a mountain of board games that he swears he actually plays.
Philip Wohlrab has spent time in the United States Coast Guard and has served for more than fifteen years in the Virginia Army National Guard. Serving as a medic attached to an infantry company, he earned the title “Doc” the hard way while serving across two tours in Iraq. He came home and continued his education, earning a Master of Public Health degree in 2016. He currently works as a wargame designer for the United States Air Force and occasionally works for the United States Space Force. He also does game design work for the civilian market. When not crafting new stories or new games he can be found attending sci-fi cons both large and small.
Marisa Wolf was born in New England and raised on Boston sports teams, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the longest books in the library (usually fantasy). Over the years she majored in English in part to get credits for reading (this . . . only partly worked), taught middle school, was headbutted by an alligator, built a career in education, earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and finally decided to finish all those half-started stories in her head.
She’s currently based in Texas, but has moved into an RV with her husband and their two ridiculous rescue dogs, and it’s anyone’s guess where in the country she is at any given moment. Learn more at www.marisawolf.net.
First-time author Ashley Prior is a mom, wife, and a town councilwoman of a small town in rural Virginia. Author of a young adult novella series set in the magical land of Fleuria, she is hard at work on the series. Besides a teenage boy (sympathize with her), she has two dogs who run the household.
Dr. Robert E. Hampson is a scientist, educator, and author. As a researcher, he studies how memory is formed, stored, and recalled in animal and human brain. As a professor, he teaches medical and graduate students in the field of neuroscience. He consults with companies and authors on brain science, and teaches public communication skills to young scientists. As an author, Rob has more than twenty short stories, three novels, and two anthologies published. He decided that he’d spent enough years turning science fiction into science, and that he wanted to try turning science into science fiction, for a change.
Nebula Award–winner Esther Friesner is the author of over forty novels and more than two hundred short stories. She has a Ph.D. in Spanish from Yale University and is also a poet, a playwright, and the editor of several anthologies. The best known of these is the Chicks in Chainmail series that she created and edits for Baen Books (which might have had a little something-something to do with this book). In addition to SF, fantasy, and a bit of horror, she is the author of the Princesses of Myth series of young adult novels from Random House.
Esther is married, a mother of two and grandmother of two, harbors cats, and lives in Connecticut. She has a fondness for bittersweet chocolate, graphic novels, manga, travel, and jewelry. There is no truth to the rumor that her family motto is “Oooooh, SHINY!”
Her superpower is the ability to winnow her bookshelves without whining about it. Much.