Klandor Enterprise

B Ward Powers has a string of degrees and qualifications and an even longer list of occupations and professions, covering everything from linguistics to theology, accountant to entrepreneur. But most of all he is a teacher and a researcher, a reader and a writer with a love of books – fiction and non-fiction. He has written over twenty books.

Ward has been writing Science Fiction since the 1960s, and Philip and David Powers, and Marti Ward, were raised on his writings as much as the SF and Adventure classics of the day – Ward’s 10000-book library, back then, included every book by his favourite authors. It has doubled several of times in the intervening decades.

The Moonchild Rising collection came out on the day of Ward's death in 2022, and his wish was for Marti (as literary executor) to complete and publish his unpublished works. The Klandor Rising collection - and the individual stories - are being published posthumously (as both ebooks and audiobooks). But don't worry - there is still quite a collection of writings to bring to life.

Marti Ward is a multi-award-winning author, teacher, researcher and entrepreneur known for his serial startups and his interdisciplinary work from the behavioural, cognitive, health and information sciences to environmental, biomedical and robotic engineering - but he writes under several variants of his name. Marti Ward is the pseudonym he uses for his fiction, which is intended to explore the implications and directions of current science and technology is taking, as well as to inspire a new generation of explores in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmatics (STEM).

Marti hasn't been into space yet, but has travelled extensively on this planet - living in half a dozen countries and speaking and reading a variety of languages with varying degrees of fluency. He hasn't yet built an AI as sophisticated as Al - but is working on it. He has around 300 publications relating to AI, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics and Robotics, including several non-fiction books under his own name.

Marti was brought up reading a wide range of books, fiction and non-fiction - exploring Encyclopaedia Britannica at the age of four when his parents wouldn't answer his persistent "How?" and "Why?" questions. His first fantasy story, Ghostie was published in print and audio form when he was seven years old - being used in teacher training.

Marti particularly enjoyed the Robot stories of Isaac Asimov. Intelligent AIs from his childhood, Astroboy and HAL, featured in his PhD thesis - and these stories and characters might just get mentioned in his Paradisi writing too. But he really fell in love with Anne McCaffrey's PERN stories - so don't be surprised to see influences from that source either.