CONTRIBUTORS

Russell Blackford is a philosopher and critic. He is known especially as an outspoken defender of secularism and individual rights. He has published three novels set in the Terminator universe, among others, co-edited 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We are Atheists, and holds a law degree and a pair of Ph.D.s. He and Jenny Blackford live in Newcastle, New South Wales.

Damien Broderick has only one Ph.D., but has published some 45 novels, scholarly tomes, and popular science books on the paranormal, the technological singularity, the prospect of radical life extension, and the very far future. In 2010 he was runner-up for the Theodore Sturgeon short fiction award, and received the A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award. These days he lives in San Antonio, Texas, but remains a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

Terry Dowling holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia, and has published many awarded and anthologized stories in all fantastika genres: science fiction (notably his Tom Rynosseros sequence), horror and fantasy. He has created several computer games, and his debut novel Clowns at Midnight appeared from PS Publishing in 2010. He was closely involved with Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature from its inception until the mid-1990s.

Bruce Gillespie, one of Australia’s most celebrated sf fan writers and editors, in 1969 founded Science Fiction Commentary (which has been nominated three times for a Hugo Award). His early writings on the work of Philip K. Dick drew attention to an author comparatively neglected at the time, and his publication of translations into English of Stanislaw Lem’s criticism was of similar significance. He gained the 2007 A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award, and lives in Melbourne, Victoria, surrounded by immense numbers of books, cats and CDs.

Van Ikin, winner of the inaugural A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award in 1992, is co-author of Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (with Russell Blackford and Sean McMullen) and co-editor of Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF (the first-ever Australian Best of collection, co-edited with Terry Dowling in 1993). As a Professor in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, he teaches creative writing and coordinates the postgraduate program for his School, leaving little time for sf-related pursuits and causing ever-longer delays for those which do still go ahead, as lamented in his Introduction.

Sylvia Kelso works at James Cook university of North Queensland, Australia. She is an editorial board member for Femspec and contributing editor for Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, recently guest-editing a special volume of Paradoxa on Ursula K. Le Guin. Two of her novels have been shortlisted in the Aurealis Awards for genre fiction.

David Lake was born in India in 1929. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland. From the age of ten or less he was fascinated by science fiction, and soon read Verne and Wells. But he only began writing sf about 1970, and from 1975 to 1985 published nine or ten novels and some short stories. Around 2000 he realized he wanted to say nothing more. About the future he is a black pessimist (“really, always was,” he adds).

Helen Merrick holds a Ph.D. in feminist science fiction, and is Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative arts at Curtin University in Western Australia. She is co-editor of Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through Science Fiction and Feminism (with Tess Williams, 1999) and her recent book The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms (2009) received the 2010 William Atheling Jr. Award for sf criticism.

Sean McMullen holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature, works on complicated technical things in a scientific research establishment, and lives in a bayside Melbourne suburb where he jogs across the solar system on most nights—there’s a one billionth scale bronze model of it along the foreshore. In his spare time he has written seventeen books and seventy stories, mostly science fiction, along with a couple of hundred talks and articles. He is co-author of Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction (with Russell Blackford and Van Ikin)

David Medlen had his earliest encounter with science fiction at age three when given a Captain Scarlett chocolate bar. Since then he has researched areas of interest within the field and published several articles. He is currently a Library Officer at the University of Western Australia and reminds us that Casanova became a librarian after being the world’s greatest lover because it was a promotion.

Yvonne Rousseau graduated with Honors in English and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She lives in Adelaide, South Australia in the large equally book-crammed house she shared with her late husband John Foyster, reading prodigiously and writing wittily but publishing far too little. Her study The Murders at Hanging Rock is a brilliant Rashomon-like investigation of Joan Lindsay’s famous novel. She was a joint editor, then convener, of Australian Science Fiction Review (Second Series).

Bruce Shaw, author of The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2010) and a number of studies such as Our Heart is the Land: Aboriginal Reminiscences from the Western Lake Eyre Basin, did his early professional work in anthropology, compiling oral history of aboriginal Australians before turning to English literature. A book on the life history of an Aboriginal woman is currently in press. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Western Australia and a PhD in English from Flinders University in South Australia. He lives in Perth, Western Australia where he is visited by a neighbor’s cat.

Darko Suvin was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at McGill University, and is now its Professor Emeritus and Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. He edited two scholarly journals, and published three volumes of poetry as well as many articles on Utopian and Science Fiction, Comparative Literature and Dramaturgy, Theory of Culture, and Political Epistemology. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes three of his 15 books as “one of the most formidable and sustained theoretical attempts to define sf as a genre.” He was awarded the Pilgrim Award (for services to sf scholarship) in 1979.

George Turner remains perhaps Australia’s most highly regarded if contentious science fiction author and critic. He shared the 1962 Miles Franklin literary award for The Cupboard Under the Stairs, and received the 1994 A. Bertram Chandler Memorial Award. His sf novels include Beloved Son, The Sea and Summer (Drowning Towers in USA), Brainchild and Genetic Soldier. He died in 1997.

Tess Williams, self-described cyborg and Hydra, is author of the novels Map of Power and Sea as Mirror as well as several sf stories and articles on feminist sf. She is co-editor of Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through Science Fiction and Feminism (with Helen Merrick, 1999) and wrote her Ph.D. on Shared Metaphors of Change in ‘Post Neo-Darwinian’ Evolutionary Theory and Feminist Science Fiction. These days she works in academe as Research Development Officer at the University of Western Australia and is thus finding less time for sf-related pursuits—which neatly returns us, here at the end, to the lament voiced in the Introduction….