Stephen Lee Gillett

Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D., is an American geologist, astronomer, and planetologist who has worked for many years as a research scientist at the Mackay School of Mines at the University of Nevada, Reno, and who is the author of the Writer's Digest Science Fiction Writing Series title World-Building: A Writer's Guide to Constructing Star Systems and Life-Supporting Planets, edited by Ben Bova and published in 1996. He publishes his own science fiction under the pen name Lee Goodloe, mostly in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and has contributed nonfiction science essays to multiple SF venues.

World-Building is one of the foundational craft references on hard SF worldbuilding. It walks the science fiction writer through the working physics of constructing an imagined planet in a fictional star system, with the consistent argument that real science makes a sense of wonder stronger rather than weaker. Chapters cover the astronomical setting (orbits, gravity, year length, seasons, tidal action), making a planet (planetary formation, the role of historical contingency in the geology of an imagined world), the Earth as worked example, the ancient Earth as a working alien-planet analog, the other planets and satellites of our own solar system as raw material, the working physics of different star types and how they would light and heat a planet, and a closing chapter Not As We Know It on hypothetical chloroxygen worlds, water worlds, nitrogen worlds, and what he calls brimstone worlds. The book is filled with tables, diagrams, and worked calculations the writer can use directly.

His other science writing includes work in advanced materials science, rock-eating microbes and resource recovery, and the geology of the outer planets and their moons. He has been a research associate at the Mackay School of Mines and contributed to the broader scientific literature on Mars geology, exoplanet habitability, and chemical alternatives to carbon-water biology.