Peter F. Hamilton (www.peterfhamilton.co.uk) lives in Oakham, England. He began publishing SF in the early 1990s with three SF detective novels—Mindstar Rising (1993), A Quantum Murder (1994), and The Nano Flower (1995). But his prominence began with a massive trilogy of one-thousand-page novels (in its original British form)—The Reality Dysfunction (1996), The Neutronium Alchemist (1997), and The Naked God (2000), together the Night’s Dawn Trilogy. In the U.S., all three books were divided into two volumes each, so it became a six-book series). A collection, A Second Chance at Eden (1998), is set in the same “Confederation” future as the trilogy. The whole setting is so complex that Hamilton published a non-fiction guide, The Confederation Handbook: The Essential Guide to the Night’s Dawn Series, in 2000. Two of his three later novels to date are also space opera—Fallen Dragon (2001) and Pandora’s Star (2004), his Commonwealth saga. The Void Trilogy is currently being written. After Iain M. Banks, Hamilton is the most popular British space opera writer of the last decade.
“The Forever Kitten” appeared in Nature. It is small scale and closely focused, about scientific research, money, and ethics. It is just plausible enough to be an effective SF horror story.