Red Soil Through Our Fingers

Nalin A Ratnayake started his technical career as an aerospace engineer. He holds a B.S.E. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering and worked on supersonic air-breathing propulsion, environmentally responsible aviation technologies, and advanced access-to-space systems for the first part of his career.

After changing careers to education, Nalin completed an M.Ed. through the Boston Teacher Residency, focusing his studies on the connections between scientific literacy and social justice, particularly in the context of urban schools and communities.

After five years of teaching Physics and Engineering at an urban public high school in Boston, Nalin recently returned to engineering, at a research center near Norfolk, Virgina. He currently works in technical management, as the deputy project manager for an earth-observing, climate science satellite mission.

Nalin writes fiction under the name N.A. Ratnayake. His speculative fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres Magazine as well as the post-colonial SF anthology We See A Different Frontier. His short story Remembering Turinam received an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Thirty-First Edition. His Mars novel Red Soil Through Our Fingers was published in January 2016 and explores a future of corporate-controlled space settlement.

Though later a New Englander and presently a resident of the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, Nalin was born and raised in the American West — a region whose history and character continue to strongly influence his writing. The mountains, rains, coasts, and deserts of the West have been the backdrop for a rich interplay of conquest, struggle, identity, and hope. These themes often emerge entangled in Nalin’s fiction.

As an engineer, writer, and educator, Nalin is strongly committed to exploring ideas for creating a more positive and sustainable future for all people.

You can find Nalin on the web at www.naratnayake.com or by sending a message to [naratnayake at pm dot me].