Paul Wesson (1949-2015), the founder of the Space-Time-Matter Consortium, developed 5D STM theory in 1990 as an outgrowth of earlier work on scale-free cosmology in the 1980s. Brief summaries of his life and work can be found on wikipedia and in a short obituary in Physics Today. A longer scientific obituary appears as the Appendix to his last book (co-authored by James Overduin), Principles of Space-Time-Matter: Cosmology, Particles and Waves in Five Dimensions (World Scientific, 2018). A preprint version of this appendix is available on the arXiv.
In 2011, Paul created a website as an online resource for those interested in his non-fiction books as well as his three science-fiction novels and a collection of science-fiction short stories. A lightly edited version of that website, Interstellar Undertakers, is maintained here.