Dr. Edmund Schluessel is a theoretical astrophysicist, teacher and writer. Outside the classroom he is a socialist activist, active fan and amateur musician. Born in France, he currently lives in Helsinki.
As a high school student I hung around on the fandom message boards on Prodigy; I made no lasting connections. As an undergraduate in Washington DC and dabbled in conventions and sci-fi society meetings; I did not stick. In Boston I attended Arisia and Boskone and enjoyed it; I never penetrated beyond the desiccated outer layers of fandom’s epidermis. Online Terry Pratchett fandom brought me to Britain for graduate school and many of its leading members remain friends. Even living in Britain though (in Wales, which many people will forget is part of Britain) I found the geographic separation made it difficult to engage. Online fandom is great but traveling within the UK, thanks to the systematic devastation-by-privatization of the railway system, is expensive beyond the dreams of avarice for someone trying to get by as a PhD student. Nonetheless I owe alt.fan.pratchett and its satellites a huge debt: through it I met my beloved wife.
As a graduate student, he worked with the Cardiff University team that made the historic first detection of gravitational waves. Author of the “Schluessel thesis” proposing feasibility of anisotropic gravitational wave-driven cosmological models explaining dark energy. He was born in France to American parents and moved to Wales in September 2005 after living in Washington, DC from 1997. Currently teaching mathematics in Helsinki, Finland, many Danes met him indirectly as he was the editor of the Worldcon 75 newsletter.
He blogs about being a short fiction author here.