The Science Fiction Worldbuilder's Handbook

Cassandra Hunter is a speculative fiction author and former aerospace engineer with over fifteen years of experience designing stories that run on real physics. Her debut novel, *The Gravity of Silence*, won the Philip K. Dick Award and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. She has published three subsequent novels, all set in the same rigorously constructed universe, along with over two dozen short stories in venues including *Clarkesworld*, *Asimov's Science Fiction*, and *Lightspeed*.

Before turning to fiction full-time, Hunter worked as a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she contributed to trajectory design for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. That background—days spent calculating orbital insertion windows and delta-v budgets—gave her an appreciation for how constraints breed creativity. She holds a degree in aerospace engineering from MIT and an MFA in creative writing from Boston University.

Hunter is the creator of the popular Substack newsletter *Stellar Cartography*, where she explores the intersection of science and storytelling. She has taught worldbuilding workshops at Clarion West, the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Her approach to teaching emphasizes the same principle she brings to her fiction: that the most fantastical worlds feel real when they are built with the same rigor we apply to understanding our own.

She lives in Seattle with her partner and two cats, none of whom have any patience for unscientific depictions of artificial gravity. She is currently at work on a new novel set in a star system where the laws of physics are not what they first appear.