Walter M. Miller, Jr. grew up in the American South and enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor. He spent most of World War II as a radio operator and tail gunner, participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. Fifteen years later he wrote
A Canticle for Leibowitz. The sequel,
Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, followed after nearly forty years.
Terry Bisson is the award-winning author of numerous short stories as well as the novels
Talking Man and
Voyage to the Red Planet.