Stephen Baxter was born in 1957. Raised in Liverpool, he has a mathematics degree from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D from Southampton. He sold his first short stories to Interzone in 1986 and was a prizewinner in the Writers of the Future contest. His first novel, Raft, was published in 1991, to great acclaim. The Time Ships is his sixth novel. He is married and lives in Buckinghamshire.