Alastair Reynolds (www.members.tripod.com/~voxish) lives in Glamorgan, Wales. He worked for ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004. He began writing SF in the early 1990s, and his first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999. He was immediately grouped as one of the new British space opera writers emerging in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most “hard SF” of the new group. His most recent novels are The Prefect (2007), and House of Suns (2008). Two collections of his stories were published in 2006, Zima Blue and Galactic North. An expanded version of the Zima Blue collection is out in 2009. He next novel, out in 2009, is a far future, steampunk-influenced planetary romance provisionally entitled Terminal World.
“Fury” appeared in Eclipse 2. It is about as well-constructed a space opera as we have seen in recent years, with a carefully plotted mystery at its core, and some political undertones. Mercurio, the head bodyguard, and the Emperor of the Galactic Empire have been together for centuries. When there is an incident in the palace, Mercurio must investigate, even if it takes him far away in the galaxy.