Robert Reed (www.robertreedwriter.com) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and daughter, and is a Nebraska science fiction renaissance of one. He is perhaps the Poul Anderson of his generation. He is certainly the most prolific SF writer of high-quality short fiction writing today. He has had stories appear in at least one of the annual Year’s Best anthologies in every year since 1992. He is perhaps most famous for his Marrow universe, and the novels and stories that take place in that huge, ancient spacefaring environment. A new Marrow book, Eater of Bone, collecting four novellas, is out this year. His story collections, The Dragons of Springplace (1999) and The Cukoo’s Boys (2005), skim only some of the cream from his body of work. He is overdue for another substantial collection. He had another excellent year in a long line of them in 2011, and could easily have had three or four stories in this volume.
“Our Candidate” was published at Tor.com, and this is perhaps its first time in print. It is a story about how the illusion of political participation and democracy can pave the way to fascism. We offer it for what it is worth in an election year during hard times in the U.S.