James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written some 25 books in his nearly 45 years of publishing stories and novels. His short story “Unidentified Objects” was nominated for an O. Henry Award, and two of his stories have won World Fantasy Awards. He has taught writing at Chapman University in Orange, California, for the past 25 years.
Gabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at York College of Pennsylvania. His areas of research are the rhetoric of science, technical writing pedagogy and science fiction literature. His work investigates the use of visuals in undergraduate and graduate scientific and technical writing in American colleges and universities at the end of the 19th century.
Richard Feist’s research concentrates on the history of ethics, meta-ethics, and military ethics as well as the philosophy of science, mathematics and process metaphysics. He is at work on papers in public ethics; the Victorian roots of Whitehead’s and McTaggart’s metaphysics; and a study of the historical relationship between Western ethics and Western warfare. He also works on the interface of science fiction and metaphysics, especially in works by Philip K. Dick, Walter M. Miller, Jr., and James Blish.
Daniel Gilbertson moved to the United States in the late 1970s after graduating from Oxford University, where he was an active member of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group. He spent three decades in Los Angeles working as a writer-producer-director for a wide variety of companies and start-ups. Now retired, he resides in Santa Monica.
Ursula Heise is the Marcia H. Howard Chair at UCLA. Her books include Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford, 2008), and Imagining Extinction (Chicago, 2016). She is the managing editor of Futures of Comparative Literature (Routledge, 2016) and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2016). She is also a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and served as president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.
Michael Kvamme-O’Brien is a secondary English teacher with degrees from Aberdeen, Strathclyde and Glasgow. His Ph.D. thesis tests the hypothesis that certain authors require their protagonists to think mythologically to transcend the limits of their material universes. He has published on Phil Farmer in Vector, has a chapter on 2000AD coming out in Aliens in Popular Culture by ABC-CLIO, and is working toward publishing his dissertation as a monograph.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of 11 novels, including Girl in Landscape, Chronic City, and The Feral Detective. His fifth, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for fiction. His stories and essays have been collected in six volumes, and he’s also the author of monographs on the film They Live and the album Fear of Music. In 2005, he was made a Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation.
Sean Matharoo is a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Riverside, where he studies French, Francophone, and Anglophone speculative literature and philosophy. He has published his research in Green Letters and Horror Studies, book reviews in Science Fiction Studies, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Science Fiction Film and Television, interviews in The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and encyclopedia entries.
Tim Powers is the author of more than a dozen novels, including The Anubis Gates, Alternate Routes, and On Stranger Tides, which was the basis of the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He lives in San Bernardino.
Gregg Rickman teaches at Sonoma State University. He has edited numerous works on Dick, including The Early Works of Philip K. Dick, Vols. 1 and 2 (Prime, 2008) and To the High Castle, Philip K. Dick: A Life, 1928–1962 (Valentine, 1989). He also edited The Science Fiction Film Reader (Limelight, 2004), and other readers on film. He has published numerous articles on Philip K. Dick as well.
Umberto Rossi is a secondary school teacher, independent scholar and the chief editor of the PULP Libri online book magazine. He is the author of The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick (McFarland, 2011), coeditor of a collection of essays on Thomas Pynchon’s V. (with Paolo Simonetti, CSP, 2016), and has written articles on J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Barry N. Malzberg and Jonathan Lethem for Science-Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Foundation. He is a member of the Science Fiction Research Association.
Paul Sammon has written numerous books, including Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott: Close Up, The Making of Starship Troopers, Conan the Phenomenon, the Splatterpunk anthologies, and the Alien Screenplay book. He has also worked on approximately 100 films, including Conan the Barbarian, Robocop, Dune, Blue Velvet, and The Silence of the Lambs.
David Sandner, professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, is the author of Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831 (Ashgate, 2011), a finalist for a Mythopoeic Award. He wrote The Fantastic Sublime (Greenwood, 1996), and is editor of Treasury of the Fantastic (Tachyon, 2013) and Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader (Praeger, 2004). A member of Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association, he chaired the 2016 Philip K. Dick Conference.
Samuel Sousa teaches as a lecturer in the American Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton. His works has an emphasis on politics in music-based subcultures, especially in Southern California punk music and the related zine culture.
Gary Westfahl is the author, editor, or coeditor of 28 books, including the Hugo Award–nominated Science Fiction Quotations (Yale, 2005) and the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005). He has coedited Bridges to Science Fiction and Fantasy (2018) and Arthur C. Clarke (2018), among others. In 2003, he received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for his lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.