Brandon Sanderson was born on December 19, 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in creative writing from Brigham Young University. His first book, Elantris, was published in 2005. His other works include the Mistborn series, the Stormlight Archive series, Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series, and the Reckoners series. In 2007, he was chosen by Harriet Rigney to complete A Memory of Light, book twelve in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. He has continued the series with Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. In 2018 his title, White Sand Volume 2, made the Best Seller List.
Jerry Eugene Pournelle was born in Shreveport, Louisiana on August 7, 1933. During the Korean War, he served in the U. S. Army. He received a B.S. in psychology in 1955, an M.S. in psychology in 1958, and a Ph.D. in political science in 1964 from the University of Washington. He worked for Boeing and NASA where he worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. He also advised the federal government on military matters and space exploration. He wrote science fiction and helped popularize the military science fiction genre. His first novel, Red Heroin, was published in 1969 under the pen name Wade Curtis. His other novels published under his own name included Janissaries, Starswarm, and The Mercenary. He also wrote novels with Larry Niven including Oath of Fealty, The Mote in God's Eye, Lucifer's Hammer, Inferno, Escape from Hell, and Footfall. Pournelle was widely credited as the first major author to write a published novel entirely on a computer. He wrote a witty advice columns for computer users in Byte magazine. He received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 1973. He died of heart failure on September 8, 2017 at the age of 84.