John F. Carr lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania with his wife Victoria, an editor and columnist; they have two children, Jeremy and Nicole, and two cats, Gemma and Jessica. Carr was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but moved to San Diego at age 4, when his father went to work for the Naval Electronics Lab in Point Loma, San Diego. His father, an aero-space engineer, later worked for Convair and General Dynamics, helping to develop the Atlas and Atlas/Centaur missiles. John's grandfather, who received a degree in Electricity from Columbia University in 1908, was one of the Wizards of Menlo Park who worked under Thomas Edison. His tall tales of scientific wonders helped light the flame of storytelling in young John's mind. He started writing his first novel while studying history at San Diego State University. His first published work was The Ophidian Conspiracy in 1975. He has since published over twenty novels, a dozen or more short stories and edited some fourty anthologies and short story collections. Carr edited the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of American from 1976 to 1979, and later severed as both SFWA Treasurer and Vice-President. He worked as co-editor with Jerry Pournelle from 1975 to 1996 in Studio City, California. Together they published over thirty anthologies and story collections, including the Baen Books paperback magazine, Far Frontiers. In the mid-eighties he worked as an independent acquisition editor for both Tor Books and Baen Books. He was the Science Fiction editor of Popular Computing. Carr is recognized as an authority on H. Beam Piper (a Pennsylvania SF writer) and his works. He edited four Piper short story collections for Ace Books and wrote H. Beam Piper: A Biography for McFarland & Co. and most recently Typewriter Killer, which focuses on Piper's writing and his Terro-Human Future History. He has written seven sequels to H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, the most recent and final being Down Styphon!, as well as two far-future sequels to Piper's Space Viking. And is currently working on "Return to Space Viking," the direct sequel to Space Viking, which he plotted out with Jerry Pournelle back in the late Seventies. THE KALVAN SAGA There aren't very many alternate histories as beloved as that begun with the late H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, in which Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Trooper and former US Army combat infantryman, is whisked to an alternate timeline, where early Indo-Europeans went east to Asia and then North America, rather than west, into Europe. In that timeline Corporal Morrison, known as "Kalvan" to the locals, makes a better gunpowder, builds an army, wins the battles, saves the princedom of his friends, marries the princess, and creates a new "Great Kingdom." And that's just in the first book, whew. In the process of all that, he makes an enemy out of Styphon, the local god of gunpowder (which is to say he makes an enemy of the corrupt priesthood feeding at Styphon's gunpowder monopoly trough), makes a couple of mistakes that turned out to be much worse than he could have anticipated, and finds himself on the short end of the financial and manpower lever. In short, he loses a key battle and finds out why Moltke the Elder, and most experienced soldiers, find retreat the hardest operation of all. And that where Economy of Force, Surprise, and their handmaiden, deception, come in, with a little help from the local's devotion to and fear of Galzar, God of War. The Kalvan Saga is the story of a Pennsylvania Police Officer who is picked up accidentally by a transtemporal conveyer and dropped off on Styphon's House subsector, a16th Century alternate-history world ruled by a parasitic and brutal theocracy, which holds the secret of gunpowder as a mystery from their god. For more information on Kalvan's World: visit www.hostigos.com
