Vernor Vinge sold his first science-fiction story in 1964. He is best known for "True Names," "The Peace War," "Marooned in Realtime," (which were nominated for Hugos) and "A Fire Upon the Deep" (which won a Hugo). His newest novel, "A Deepness in the Sky," was published by Tor Books in the spring of 1999. Vinge received a PhD (Math) from the University of California. He is an associate professor in the Department of Math and CS at San Diego State University. His current interest is in distributed computing systems.