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Biographical InfoAlan Smale has been writing fiction since he was twelve years old, when he elected to stay inside during school breaktimes to pen stories about intrepid men of action rather than risk going outside to get beaten up by the school terror squads. His novels, "Blood in the Snow" and "Camp Noah", were deservedly left behind at his parents' house in Leeds, England when he emigrated to the U.S. in 1988.
His first published story, a penetrating study of dragons, heroism,
precocious behavior and bad breath, appeared in the Harcourt Brace young
adult anthology "A Wizard's Dozen" in 1993. Since then, Alan's short
stories have appeared in nearly twenty professional and small press
markets including "Realms of Fantasy" (three times), "Writers of the
Future #13," "A Nightmare's Dozen", "Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy
Magazine", "Adventures of Sword and Sorcery", the Meisha Merlin original
anthology "Low Port", edited by Lee and Miller, and the new version of
"Book of Dead Things", edited by Jens and Cherry.
When not working or writing, Alan sings bass with rocking vocal band, The Chromatics. The
Chromatics, a six-member mixed group who write and arrange most of their
own songs, perform frequently in the MD/DC/VA/PA area. Alan is the Red
Chromatic, the Business Manager for the group, and co-creator of their
popular AstroCappella
project of original astronomy songs;
Alan's first stage roles were in British amateur dramatics: "Witness for the Prosecution" by Agatha Christie, followed closely by appearances in plays by Coward, Priestly, Shaw, and Stoppard. His more recent adventures in community theater have been with the Music and Drama club (MAD), at NASA/GSFC. In 1995 Alan played the role of Charlie in "The Foreigner" by Larry Shue, in a show which won the Washington, DC-area Ruby Griffith Award for Excellence in a Non-Musical Production, Runner Up (i.e. "second prize for drama"). The following year he appeared as the cheeky bellhop in "Lend Me A Tenor" by Ken Ludwig. In early 2001 Alan took a brief vacation from The Chromatics to play the challenging role of Clifford Anderson in Ira Levin's stage thriller "Deathtrap". The bruises have now healed....
In his professional life, Alan works at NASA Headquarters in downtown
Washington DC, as Prior to this, from 1988-2003 Alan was a Senior Research Scientist for USRA at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, specializing in the physics of low-mass X-ray binaries, the best, brightest and most variable X-ray sources in our Galaxy. LMXBs are close binaries containing either a neutron star or a black hole, sucking in material from a more typical star in orbit around it. Alan led the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) Guest Observer Facility (GOF), which provides community access to the RXTE scientific satellite, launched in 1995. He was also heavily involved in the detailed design of a similar facility for the gamma ray burst chasing satellite, Swift, launched in November 2004.
Going back in time still further, Alan worked on the data analysis software
for the US/Japanese ASCA scientific satellite (launched 1993), and on the
BBXRT payload on Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-35; Dec 1990). He has analyzed
X-ray data from a variety of other satellites, optical and Alan grew up in Leeds, Yorkshire, and received a B.A. in Physics and a doctorate in Astrophysics from Oxford University (St Edmund Hall). He became an American citizen just before July 4th, 2000, but regretfully still can't quite do the accent. He's awfully sorry about that.
Other interests and related links:Alan on Facebook
The Chromatics (a
cappella group)
NASA's Science Mission Directorate
RXTE Guest Observer Facility
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These and other stories have earned several Honorable Mentions in
best-of-year anthologies and occasional nominations for the Bram Stoker
Awards. Alan is currently marketing two teen novels, "Barbarian Summer"
and "Sisters in Magic." He is an active member of the Science Fiction
Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association. He has stories
upcoming in "Realms of Fantasy" (a fourth time), the "Twilight
Temptations" anthology, and a stand-alone novella from Scrybe Press. [
over
10,000 copies of the AstroCappella CD are in use in classrooms across
the US, and the group has presented the project as far afield as
Florida, California, Nevada, and Hawaii. The Chromies have appeared on
PBS educational shows, ABC's Channel 9 Eyewitness News, and CNN Headline
News. They took second runner-up in the 1999 Atlantic Region Harmony
Sweepstakes, and their recent CD, "
Program Executive for Mission Operations and
Data Analysis, with particular responsibility for a wide range of exciting
missions such as Chandra, Spitzer, GP-B, Suzaku, RXTE, Swift, GALEX, WMAP,
INTEGRAL and XMM-Newton. Life is always busy, and he's having a great time in
the Corridors of Astronomical Power!
infrared
data from ground-based observatories in Australia, South Africa, Chile, the
Canary Islands, and California, and radio data from the VLA in New Mexico. He
has published nearly 100 scientific papers in professional journals, and is a
member of the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society,
and the International Astronomical Union.