Gregory Benford [www.gregorybenford.com] lives in Irvine, California. A winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, he is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. Benford is the author of the classic SF novel Timescape, as well as a number of other highly regarded works, including In the Ocean of Night and Sailing Bright Eternity. He is the finest writer of hard SF in the generation after Larry Niven, and writes primarily in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke, of immense, fertile, awesome astronomical vistas and technological marvels, but with a depth and richness of characterization not achieved by many other SF writers. Many of his (typically hard) SF stories are collected in In Alien Flesh, Matters End, and Worlds Vast and Various. Recently he began a non-fiction series of short essays on science and society with biologist Michael Rose, published on the Internet at Amazon Shorts.com
“On the Brane” was published in the original anthology Gateways. It is hard SF, a vivid depiction of the world next door; a world in synch with our own, separated from us by 20 cm along dimension Q.