About the Authors

Michael Arsenault loves to write stories. He’s won no awards, signed no lucrative contracts, and never really prospered from his work. Still he perseveres, secure in the knowledge that, like all the greatest artists, his genius will be discovered after his death. Which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it. (Feel free to send notes of encouragement to michael.b.arsenault@ gmail.com, otherwise he might be tempted to become a janitor.)

 

Pat Cadigan is the author of fifteen books, including two making-of movie books on Lost in Space and The Mummy, four media tie-ins, three short-fiction collections, one young adult book, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels Synners (1991) and Fools (1994). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Czech. She tweets as Cadigan, faces Facebook as Pat Cadigan, lives out loud on LiveJournal as fastfwd, and still finds time to roam around London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler.

Paul Di Filippo has been writing for some thirty years now and hopes to continue for a like number. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with Deborah Newton, Brownie the cocker spaniel, and Penny Century the calico cat. Paul participates in a group blog, The Inferior 4+1 at community.livejournal.com/theinferior4.

 

Sheila Finch is the author of seven science fiction novels and short stories that have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Asimov’s, Fantasy Book, and numerous anthologies. A collection of her “lingster” stories recently appeared as The Guild of Xenolinguists. Sheila taught creative writing at El Camino College for thirty years and at workshops around California. She also writes about teaching creative writing, and currently a series of her short essays on the subject appear online at the SFWA website: www.NebulaAwards.com. Her work has won several awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novella, the San Diego Book Award for Juvenile Fiction, and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Sheila’s website can be found at www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch.

 

Matthew Hughes writes science fantasy. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, and Interzone. His latest novels are Template, The Other, and Hespira: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn. Matthew’s website can be found at www.archonate.com.

 

Alex Irvine’s most recent novels are Buyout and The Narrows. He is the author of nonfiction books including The Vertigo Encyclopedia and Supernatural: John Winchester’s Journal, as well as comic series Daredevil Noir and Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox. He teaches at the University of Maine. Alex blogs at alexirvine.blogspot .com.

 

Jay Lake is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. “Permanent Fatal Errors” is part of Jay’s Sunspin cycle of stories, others of which may be found in The New Space Opera 2 and his 2010 collection The Sky That Wraps. Lake’s other 2010 books include Pinion and The Baby Killers. His short fiction appears regularly worldwide. Jay’s website can be found at www.jlake.com.

 

David Langford has published over thirty books, about eighty short stories, and hundreds of magazine columns since his fiction debut in 1975. His awards include the Skylark, the European SF Award (shared with co-authors Peter Nicholls and Brian Stableford) and twenty-eight Hugos—some of the latter awarded for his SF newsletter Ansible, launched in 1979 and currently appearing monthly at: news.ansible.co.uk. Langford’s most popular novel is the nuclear farce The Leaky Establishment (1984), based on his years as a weapons physicist. His straight stories are collected as Different Kinds of Darkness (2004), and his notorious parodies and pastiches as He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003); his most recent collection, of columns, essays, reviews, and a few short-short stories, is Starcombing (2009). His large Victorian house in Reading, England, contains numerous computers and far too many books.

 

Paul McAuley worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University, before becoming a full-time writer. His latest novels are The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. He lives in North London. Paul’s blog, Earth and Other Unlikely Worlds, can be found at unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com.

 

Yves Meynard was born in 1964 and has been active in Québec science fiction circles since 1986. He served as literary editor for the magazine Solaris from 1994 to 2001. He has published over forty stories in French and English and seventeen books, including three short-story collections, nine YA novels, two short novels, and one huge space opera. Several of these works were written in collaboration with Jean-Louis Trudel under the common pen name of Laurent McAllister. His fantasy novel in English, The Book of Knights, a finalist for the 2000 Mythopoeic Award for Best Novel, was translated into French as Le Livre des chevaliers. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université de Montréal and earns a living as a software developer. Yves’s website can be found at pages.videotron.com/ymeynard .

 

James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. Upon reaching adulthood, he proceeded to write nine novels and enough short stories to fill two collections. To date Jim’s most conspicuous effort is a postmodern historical epic called The Last Witchfinder, praised by the New York Times for fusing “storytelling, showmanship, and provocative book-club bait.” He followed it with a thematic sequel, The Philosopher’s Apprentice, which NPR called “an ingenious riff on Frankenstein,” and a standalone novella, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, set in 1945 and dramatizing the U.S. Navy’s attempt to leverage a Japanese surrender via a biological weapon that strangely anticipates Godzilla. A two-time winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award, Jim maintains a website at www.jamesmorrow.net.

 

Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. He is the winner of five Hugos, plus other major awards in the USA, France, Spain, Croatia, Poland, and Japan. He is the author of sixty novels, over 240 stories, and two screenplays, and has edited more than forty anthologies. His work has appeared in twenty-three languages. You can find Mike on Facebook.

 

Lezli Robyn is an Australian writer who wrote and sold her first two stories to Clarkesworld and Jim Baen’s Universe in the closing months of 2008. In the thirteen months since then she has made sixteen further story sales, selling to markets such as Asimov’s, Analog, Tor’s 50th Anniversary Twilight Zone anthology, Hadley Rille’s anthology Origins, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and other science fiction markets as distant as China, Russia, Poland, Italy, and Bulgaria—alone or in collaboration with Mike Resnick. Lezli is currently working on her first novel and a YA trilogy with Mike Resnick.

 

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is a bestselling, award-winning writer of genre fiction, whose latest book, Diving into the Wreck, has garnered excellent reviews. She also writes mystery as Kris Nelscott and funny paranormal romances as Kristine Grayson (the next of those, The Charming Way, will appear in spring 2011). She’s the first writer to have a science fiction crime story in the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories and The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology. That same year, she won the Asimov’s Readers Choice Award and The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Her short story collection, Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories, has just appeared. She got the idea for “The Dark Man” while in Rome with Adrian Nikolas Phoenix, who was researching a novel set near the Spanish Steps. Find out more about Rusch’s work (and those of her pen names) at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

 

Felicity Shoulders was born in Portland, Oregon, nine months after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. She holds an MFA in writing from Pacific University. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her website can be found at felicityshoulders.com.

 

Ray Vukcevich’s fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies and has been collected in Meet Me in the Moon Room from Small Beer Press. Find his tweets, links to online stories, interviews, and more at www.rayvuk.com.

 

Ian Watson’s most recent story collection may well be the only full-length genre fiction book written in collaboration with a writer of a different mother tongue: the transgressive and satiric The Beloved of My Beloved (2009) with Italian surrealist Roberto Quaglia, two stories from which have been anthologized in volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Ian also wrote the screen story for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, based on almost a year’s work eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick. With Ian Whates, he has just co-edited The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories. He lives in a very small village in rural England midway between Oxford and Stratford. Ian’s website can be found at www.ianwatson.info.

 

Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Utne Reader, Midstream, Vestal Review, Asimov’s, Witpunk, Fugue, Parabola, Best New Horror, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and others. Her collection, Crazy Love (2008) earned starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension and is a writer- in-schools in Lane County, Oregon. Visit Whatworld at www.lesliewhat.net.