Fast Draw
PAUL PEDERSON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In the sixth grade, Roy entered a writing contest and won a copy of Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet. It opened a door that led to Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, an endless parade of new worlds and ideas.
Later, as a psychology student at Colby College, he met his first computer (or rather its teleprinter acolytes). He can still hear the humming of those metal beasts as they gobbled up his tentative typing and spat back their master’s reply in a loud ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.
He went on to work in five computer-related companies, co-founding three of them. He saw the machines grow ten times more powerful, then a hundred, then a thousand, then a million, with no end in sight.
Today, his stories reflect on the rise of technology and how it may change the way we think about the universe and our place in it.
Roy was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the top-secret atomic city, and grew up in Ohio, Vermont and Pennsylvania. While at Colby, in Maine, he met his wife and many of the lifelong friends who, together with his family, have encouraged his writing.
In his spare time, he likes to travel and has visited all seven continents and spent three years exploring the US in an RV. His hobbies include archery, yoga and pickleball.
Just minutes after learning of this story’s acceptance by the Writers of the Future, he stepped into his backyard and watched a Delta IV rocket blast into the night sky over Cape Canaveral as if in grand celebration!
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Paul Pederson is also the illustrator for “The Paradise Aperture” in this volume. For more about him, please see this page.