Tobias S. Buckell (www.tobiasbuckell.com) lives in Bluffton, Ohio. His website biographical information includes such fascinating tidbits as “Tobias was born in Grenada in 1979, just as a semi-Marxist government took over the country. By 1983 the government began executing members of its own party, and thus his earliest memories are of nervous adults, not being allowed near windows, and of the American Intervention/Invasion,” and “Tobias grew up on a boat in Grenada, and also lived aboard boats in the British Virgin Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands when his family moved away from Grenada after the war. In 1995 Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the boat he lived on in St. Thomas. His family moved to Ohio where his stepdad grew up.” He went to college at Bluffton University and still works there. He has published more than twenty-five stories and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002. His first novel, The Crystal Ship, publishes in 2006.
“Toy Planes” was published in Nature. It is a charming story about a Caribbean space program, sort of a joke, eh?—with a pleasantly memorable political point. It’s the same kind of fiction as Fred Pohl’s little jewel, “The Day the Martians Came.”