The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (44 page)

Derek Künsken
writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror in Gatineau, Québec. His fiction has appeared in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
,
On Spec
,
Black Gate
, and multiple times in
Asimov’s
. “Persephone Descending” was his first appearance in both
Analog
and
StarShipSofa
. Derek has been short-listed for the Aurora and won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, while his work has been podcast in all three Escape Artists podcasts, translated for several foreign sf magazines, and has appeared in the
Best Horror of the Year.
Derek blogs at www.blackgate.com and tweets at @DerekKunsken. “Persephone Descending” is part of a larger space opera universe he’s been building recently.

William Ledbetter
lives near Dallas with his family and too many animals. A Writers of the Future award winner, Bill is also a consulting editor at
Heroic Fantasy Quarterly
. Bill is the administrator of the annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for Baen Books. He can be found on the web at http://www.williamledbetter.com/.

David D. Levine
is the author of
Arabella of Mars
(Tor 2016) and over fifty SF and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo Award, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell. Stories have appeared in
Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF
, five Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection
Space Magic
from Wheatland Press. David is a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s bestselling shared-world series Wild Cards. He is also a member of publishing cooperative Book View Cafe and nonprofit Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc. He has narrated podcasts for Escape Pod, PodCastle, and StarShipSofa, and his video “Dr. Talon’s Letter to the Editor” was a finalist for the Parsec Award. In 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. David lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kate Yule. His web site is www.daviddlevine.com.

Linda Nagata
is a Nebula and Locus-award-winning author. Her more recent work includes short fiction “Nahiku West,” runner up for the 2013 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the novel
The Red: First Light,
a near-future military thriller that was a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Though best known for science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series
Stories of the Puzzle Lands
. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

Brad R. Torgersen 
is the author of numerous stories, novelettes, and novellas which have appeared in the pages of 
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 
magazine,
 Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
 webzine, Mike Resnick’s
 Galaxy’s Edge
 magazine, and beyond. He’s a two-time winner of the 
Analog 
AnLab readers’ choice award, a three-time Hugo award nominee, and a winner in the 26th annual Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest. A full-time healthcare computer geek, Torgersen is a Chief Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. He lives in Utah with his wife and daughter. His first novel,
The Chaplain’s War
 was released by Baen Books in 2014, preceded by his short fiction collections
 Lights in the Deep
 and 
Racers of the Night
.

Michael Z. Williamson
is retired military, having served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force. He was deployed for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Fox. Williamson is a state-ranked competitive shooter in combat rifle and combat pistol. He has consulted on military matters, weapons and disaster preparedness for Discovery Channel and Outdoor Channel productions and is Editor-at-Large for Survivalblog, with 300,000 weekly readers. In addition, Williamson tests and reviews firearms and gear for manufacturers. Williamson’s books set in his Freehold Universe include
 Freehold
, 
Better to Beg Forgiveness . . .
,
 Do Unto Others . . .
, and 
When Diplomacy Fails . . .
He is also the author of 
The Hero
—written in collaboration with 
New York Times
 bestselling author John Ringo. Williamson was born in England, raised in Liverpool and Toronto, Canada, and now lives in Indianapolis with his family.