Gerald Nordley is an author and astronautical engineer with degrees in physics and systems management. A retired Air Force officer, Gerald worked in spacecraft operations, production, and advanced propulsion. His last paper was "Mass Beam Propulsion: An Overview" with Adam Crowl in JBIS. He serves as Chairman of the Board for the Experimental Rocket Propulsion Society. He is also active in CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, an interdisciplinary space-oriented academic conference. As science fiction writer "G. David Nordley," his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space. His stories focus on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. He is a past Hugo and Nebula award nominee as well as a four-time winner of the Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact annual "AnLab" reader's poll. His last novel was To Climb a Flat Mountain, and the latest book is a collection, A World Beneath the Stars, from Brief Candle Press. The latest sale at this writing is "Empress of Starlight" for Analog. He and his wife Gayle, a retired Apple software engineer, live in Sunnyvale, CA.