Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side… or maybe it’s the other way around. He told stories to imaginary friends and learned to type on his brother's manual typewriter even though he couldn't reach the keys. (He types with the keyboard in his lap still today.) He couldn't imagine any career but writing fiction... until his algebra teacher said, "This is a program. You should write one of these."

Fast forward 30 years of programming, writing, and teaching. He was named an MVP by Microsoft for his work with the developer community. He is an avid role-playing gamemaster, but that didn't satisfy his storytelling urge. He wrote, but he never submitted until his brother-in-law read a chapter and said, "That's not a chapter. That's a story. Send it in." It won second place in the Baen Memorial Writing Contest and earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!

Martin hasn't stopped writing (or programming) since. His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy's Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and select service garages worldwide. His novella "Murder on the Aldrin Express" was reprinted in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year's Top Short SF Novels 4. Learn more at http://Shoemaker.Space.

SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR

As an author, Martin has sold stories to the following markets:

"Not Close Enough", in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2013.

"Murder on the Aldrin Express", in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2013.

"Brigas Nunca Mais", in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2015.

"Il Gran Cavallo", in Galaxy's Edge #5, November 2013.

"Pallbearers", in Galaxy's Edge #7, March 2014.

"Murder on the Aldrin Express", in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois.

"Murder on the Aldrin Express", in The Year's Top Short SF Novels 4.

"The Night We Flushed the Old Town" in Therefore I Am: Digital Science Fiction Volume 2.

"Father-Daughter Outing", the cover story for Heir Apparent: Digital Science Fiction Volume 4.

"Gruff Riders" in The Gruff Variations: Writing for Charity Anthology, Vol. 1

His writing has also won the following awards:

Writers of the Future, Quarter 1, 2011: Finalist, "The Mother Anthony"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 2, 2011: Honorable Mention, "Father-Daughter Outing"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 3, 2011: Honorable Mention, "Scramble"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 4, 2011: Semi-Finalist, "A Most Auspicious Star"

The 2012 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest: Second Place, "Scramble"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 1, 2012: Finalist, "One Last Chore for Grandpa"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 2, 2012: Honorable Mention, "Incoming"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 3, 2012: Honorable Mention, "Fog Traffic"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 4, 2012: Honorable Mention, "Mama's Little Angel"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 1, 2013: Honorable Mention, "The Books of Cheswick"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 2, 2013: Honorable Mention, "Killing Buddy"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 3, 2013: Honorable Mention, "In Its Shadow"

Writers of the Future, Quarter 1, 2014: THIRD PLACE, "Unrefined"

In addition, he has self-published seven stories and a collection, and has more in the works.

SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE ANALYST

Martin is a software developer with 29 years experience in the industry. He has worked in the fields of color science, on-line shopping, databases, material handling, medical imaging, and customer relations management.

His most popular presentations are his UML courses, which he wrote and presents. As a side effort in his UML work, Martin has written two books on UML:

UML Applied: A .NET Perspective from Apress.

Ulterior Motive Lounge: UML, 80s Flicks, and Bunny Slippers, the world's first UML comic strip. Originally published online in 2009, this successful comic strip let Martin use humor and simple examples to teach UML to a wide audience. It is now collected in a version for Kindle.

Kenneth Schneyer forgot he wanted to be a writer for 25 years, until a 2006 home renovation forced him to find a way of retaining his sanity. Since then, he has sold stories to many science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies, several of which can be found on Amazon. In 2014, he received a Nebula nomination and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Memorial Award for his short story, "Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer".

His first collection, The Law & the Heart, was released in 2014. His second, Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices, will be released in 2020.

Ken attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at UCSD in 2009, and joined the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop in 2010. Mostly he writes science fiction and fantasy, but he's been known to write crime stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes his fancy.

He was a theater major at Wesleyan and briefly a semiprofessional actor before attending law school at the University of Michigan. He teaches legal studies and humanities at Johnson & Wales University, and has published numerous articles on the constitutive rhetoric of legal texts.

Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something with fangs. He's interested in astronomy, history, politics, philosophy, feminist theory, presidential trivia, brain science, and practically everything else. He cooks better than most people you know, and you should not play either stud poker or Trivial Pursuit against him if money is involved.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, editor, and translator from Brooklyn, NY. He's the author of The Middling Affliction (Caezik, 2022) and Eridani's Crown (UFO Publishing, 2019) fantasy novels.

Over 120 of his short stories appeared in various magazines and anthologies since 2010, including Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, etc. He's the winner of the 2014 WSFA Small Press Award for Short Fiction.

He edits the Unidentified Funny Objects series of anthologies and Future Science Fiction Digest. His other projects as editor include The Cackle of Cthulhu (Baen Books), Humanity 2.0 (Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick), Coffee: 14 Caffeinated Tales of the Fantastic (UFO Publishing) and Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse (Deorc Enterprises).

You can visit his official home page and blog at alexshvartsman.com

David Walton is an internationally bestselling author of science fiction novels, including THE GENIUS PLAGUE, which won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Novel, and TERMINAL MIND, which won the Philip K. Dick Award.

"This is the way sci-fi ought to be.”

—WALL STREET JOURNAL

"David Walton is one of our very best writers of science-fiction thrillers"

—Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Quantum Night

David lives near Philadelphia with his wife and eight children.

Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award winner, a Jim Baen Memorial Award recipient, and a past Hugo and Nebula nominee. During her graduate work at Brigham Young University she studied artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. In the years since, she has grappled with the far more complex process of raising three small children. All of these experiences sometimes infiltrate her writing.

-----------------------------------

Praise from Reviewers:

"As engrossing and brief and clever as a Twilight Zone episode, Fulda's story hooks your attention from the first sentence and stays with you long past the startling, yet fitting, end." -- Tangent Online

"The Breath of Heaven -- essentially a retelling of the HAL 9000 story, but with a very different outcome -- with its intricate examination of directives was a quite plausible updating of the classic three laws of robotics, and in some ways outshone both Asimov and Clarke in the way the story unfolded." -- Pearson Moore, Sift Book Reviews

"Movement is an award-caliber story, and clearly a major breakthrough in the career of Nancy Fulda." -- Aaron Hughes, Fantastic Reviews Blog