Tony Taylor




The author was born in 1942 and grew up in South Carolina until the tender age of seventeen, when he left home for the Air Force Academy. After graduating, he learned to fly at Craig AFB near Selma, Alabama, at the time of the famous civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. He watched Martin Luther King and the other marchers go by the main gate of the base.

His first assignment as a new pilot was in Tucson, Arizona, to learn the F-4C Phantom II, and to watch the cactus grow. He went to England for eight months in 1966; then got the call to go to Vietnam, much as described in Counters. Several incidents in Counters also happened to the author in real life, including the spectacular first mission shoot-down of his wingman.

The author resigned from the Air Force and returned to school in 1971 to get an M.S. in Physics at the University of Arizona. (He likes Arizona!) He began working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1978, most of that time as a spacecraft navigator for the Voyager project.

As a fledgling navigator, the author helped guide Voyagers 1 and 2 through encounters with Saturn in the early '80s. Watching the first pictures taken of Saturn from the far side, looking back toward the sun, the author was overwhelmed by the beautiful interplay of shadows, rings, and swirling planet body, and the title of a future book popped into his mind: The Dark Side of Saturn.

After Saturn, Voyager 2 continued outward through the solar system, and the author was responsible for the orbit determination that guided her to planets Uranus and Neptune. His L.A. Times Op-Ed articles about the Neptune encounter were syndicated nationally, and resulted in the author's being featured in an Elle Magazine article (although, in honesty, the author is not certain whether he was chosen for his ability as a writer or as a sex symbol).

He has worked at JPL since 1990 on mission planning for the Cassini project, and intends (metaphorically, at least) to ride the Cassini spacecraft through its looping inner solar system journey, out past Jupiter, to the final destination of Saturn in 2004.

The author's wife, Jan, is an assistant school principal for L.A. County. Their young daughter, Chelsea, fifteen, is a ballet dancer and an aspiring writer herself. The author hereby credits her for the coining of the word "warmones", and thanks her for graciously allowing its use in Counters. The author's older daughter, Louisa, twenty-six, is a model and an actress.

He says of each of his ladies:

She hasn't a humble bone in her body; nor has she need for one.