Geoffrey A. Landis (1955– ) is a US scientist and Hugo Award–winning writer. As a scientist, he has worked for NASA, particularly on the Rover design for Mars missions. His first science fiction story was “Elemental” for Analog in 1984 and his work rapidly began to attract interest and attention. “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1988), an engagingly human take on time travel and mathematics, won a Nebula Award. “A Walk in the Sun” (Asimov’s, 1991), describing the aftermath of a crash on the moon, won a Hugo Award, and the ambitious, fascinating “Approaching Perimelasma” (Asimov’s, 1998) examined unexpected consequences from the exploration of a black hole. Many of these stories were collected in Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (2001), which showcased Landis’s ability to infuse hard science ideas with emotion and human dilemmas.
Landis’s first novel, Mars Crossing (2000), which won a Locus Award, was similarly committed to scientific verisimilitude, although with a more conventional thriller plot. Landis has also published science fiction poetry throughout his career and has twice won the Rhysling Award. A wide sampling of his work appears in Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (1991), but Iron Angels (2009) is his first substantive collection.
“Vacuum States,” a 1988 story published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, poses a pointed set of questions about the risks of speculative physics research. As ever, it reveals an author fascinated by the detail of the universe and by the process of scientific discovery.