Contact Authority
RHIANNON TAYLOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Mitchell was born in 1973, just three months after the last man walked on the Moon. Which means that in his lifetime, no human has gone more than four hundred miles from the surface of the Earth. So perhaps it’s this slow pace of real-life progress that has made him turn to fiction to see how the continued conquest of space might play out.
He started writing ten years ago, finding early success with horror rather than science fiction. More recently he has returned to SF, with a scattering of small-press publications and a couple of novels underway. Having read a number of Writers of the Future anthologies and come away feeling as if his imagination had been stretched in twenty different ways at once, he started entering in 2009, achieving a finalist position at the first attempt. This winning story was his third entry and his first professional sale. He is also a member of the London-based writers group “The T-Party.”
His day job is in aerospace engineering (he admits to being a rocket scientist when pressed). With a full-time job and a family at home he has to be quite creative in finding time to write and gets most of it done standing up on the London Underground during rush hour, typing with his thumbs into a PDA he bought on eBay. His contest-winning story was written that way, plus a few tens of thousands of words before that. If his thumbs give out before PC-neural interfaces are developed, he’s in trouble.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Rhiannon Taylor works as a freelance artist and writer in Chicago, Illinois. She is known for her maniacal focus, driven work ethic and sense of humor. Her art reflects fantasy and sci-fi elements or themes, and often illustrates her written stories. A Wacom tablet and Photoshop are her chosen arms in the grand battle of visual artistic expression. She has won numerous art awards, such as the Triton Art Show awards for first, second and third place and a $10,000 scholarship for her art. She has published both her art and her fiction writing. Her work is on display at a permanent exhibit in downtown Chicago. She currently attends Columbia College Chicago studying fiction writing and illustration. In her spare time, she puts together online articles on writing, book reviews and free art tutorials. She also applies her creativity to cooking, though she has no plans to pursue a culinary career.