David R. Palmer

David R. Palmer is an American science fiction writer best known for Emergence, the 1981 Analog novella (expanded into a 1984 novel) narrating a post-apocalyptic diary kept by an eleven-year-old genius after a biological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity. The book and its sequel Tracking were Hugo Award finalists, and Emergence won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel in 1985. Palmer, a former Florida court reporter who began writing in the early 1980s, followed with Threshold, first of the To Halt Armageddon trilogy, but the series then stalled for over a decade while his books went out of print. Small press Ring of Fire Press revived his career from 2018 onward, publishing the long-awaited sequels Spēcial Education and Schrödinger's Frisbee. His terse, telegraphic prose style remains one of the more distinctive voices in post-apocalyptic science fiction.