March 2018, updated July 2018:
I’m a retired aerospace software engineer who’s lived almost his entire life in Southern California (after being born in England, and with excursions in my teenage years to rural and suburban Illinois), where I worked 30 years full-time for a company called Rocketdyne, owned over that period by a succession of corporations: Rockwell International, then Boeing, then Pratt & Whitney. Currently it’s owned by Aerojet and known as Aerojet Rocketdyne. I wrote, refined, and maintained software for the Space Shuttle Main Engines, for the International Space Station power distribution system, and for other projects. For much my career I specialized in process improvement, including statistical process control and process maturity standards established by the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI).
More personally, I’ve followed literary science fiction since roughly age 12, and have contributed reviews, websites, and indexes over the past 30 years. From 1988 to 2001 I wrote a monthly review column for Locus, the trade magazine of the science fiction publishing industry founded by Charles N. Brown in 1968. I reviewed short fiction in magazines and anthologies.
The Internet Science Fiction Database has this lengthy list of the columns, essays, and one-off reviews that I wrote, mostly for Locus Magazine, mostly from 1988 to 2011.
My very first webpage, on CompuServe’s site, is preserved here on this site; it includes links to seven of my 1997 era Locus columns.
In 1997 I established Locus‘s website, Locus Online, running it single-handedly for 20 years, posting sample content from the magazine plus additional content acquired and edited by me (in particular, film reviews by Gary Westfahl, and my own weekly and semi-monthly listings of notable new books and magazines). I won a Hugo Award for the site in 2002, when the World Science Fiction Convention included a special one-time Hugo category that year for Best Web Site. (The photo at the link, and below, shows me, standing third from left, next to two of the actors from the first Lord of the Rings movie, which also won a Hugo that year. Also in the photo are Ellen Datlow, Charles N. Brown, Vernor Vinge (far right), and Neil Gaiman (center below).)
In 2000 I established a science fiction awards database on the Locus Online site and in 2012 migrated it to its own domain at sfadb.com. Locus Online was redesigned and taken over by the Locus Magazine staff in October 2017, though I still contribute some content.
Though having lived most of life in Southern California, since 2015 I’ve lived with my partner in the Oakland Hills.
