Born in Southend-on-Sea, a fading costal resort at the mouth of the Thames Estuary, in 1958, Alex Stewart has been writing stories since he could first hold a pen. Introduced to science fiction at an early age by his grandmother's enthusiasm for Thunderbirds, Godzilla movies, and weekly gift of comic books, he rapidly exhausted the local library's stock of juvenile SF, and resorted to raiding the adult shelves with his mother's ticket. Since his debut in British SF magazine Interzone, Stewart has has written short stories, novels, screenplays, comic scripts, reviews, criticism and RPG scenarios, both under his own name and the pseudonym Sandy Mitchell. As Sandy Mitchell, he's best known for the popular Commissar Cain series of Warhammer 40,000 tie-ins, described by David Drake as "First rate military SF." In the late nineties, he was also a staff writer on the BBC prime time technothriller series Bugs.