Carolyn Ives Gilman lives in St. Louis, Missouri and is an internationally recognized historian specializing in North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her most recent nonfiction book, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, published in 2003 by Smithsonian Books, was featured by the History Book Club and Book of the Month Club. She is a curator of the museum of the Missouri Historical Society and is currently writing a history of the American Revolution west of the Appalachians. She has published seventeen or more SF stories since 1986, and one novel, Halfway Human (1998), in the tradition of groundbreaking SF books that deal with gender. She can reasonably be considered as a writer to be among the descendents of Ursula K. Le Guin. Her most recent book, Aliens of the Heart (2007), is a collection of short fiction from Aqueduct Press, and her novella Candle in a Bottle also appeared from Aqueduct Press in 2006.
“Arkfall” appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, which published a particularly notable batch of science fiction in 2008. The ark Cormorin is a bio-ship, a partly biological sub-marine habitat for humans, in the dark seas of a very alien planet being colonized. The humans on it have a communal life, with a detailed and plausible culture upon which their survival depends. And when an undersea volcano erupts disastrously, the rules and habits come into question in their quest to survive.