Miles Vaughn

Miles Vaughn grew up in Columbia, Maryland - a town planned so thoroughly he swears even the trees had a requirements document - equidistant from three federal acronyms and one very good library. He spent eleven years in mission operations at a physics laboratory in Laurel, flying uncrewed spacecraft: sitting console through burns, faults, and long silences, learning that every disaster is a paper trail that was legible in advance to exactly nobody.

Then he read The Artificial Man the week it dropped - three times, the third with a notebook - and it rewired him. He will tell anyone that it is the best book this platform has produced, and in the same breath that it could have been done differently, which everyone understands to mean better: one perfect witness is a single perfectly calibrated instrument, and 311 people died at that pier. A city is not an instrument. A city is full telemetry. He left the console to write the argument down. The conservator who narrates his books, he says, is his flight recorder.

He drafts set-pieces in real time against a mission stopwatch - if the escape takes four minutes, the first draft takes four minutes - and the console nameplate from his last flight sits on his desk. Retired, he says. Not surrendered.