About the Authors
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital, Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage. He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the English-speaking world.
Orson Scott Card, the author of the New York Times bestseller Ender’s Game, has won several Hugo and Nebula awards for his works of speculative fiction. His Ender novels are widely read by adults and younger readers and are increasingly used in schools. Besides these and other science fiction novels, Card writes contemporary fantasy, American-frontier fantasy, biblical novels, poetry, plays, and scripts.
Tad Williams is a former singer, shoe-seller, radio show host, and taught both grade school and college classes. He is cofounder of an interactive television company, and is currently writing comic books as well as film and television scripts. He lives with his family in London and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Kelley Armstrong is the author of young adult fiction, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and mysteries in stand-alone novels and over fifteen series. Frostbitten, The Gathering, and No Humans Involved were New York Times bestsellers. She believes experience is the best teacher, though she has been told this shouldn’t apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery, and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of nearly four dozen novels, including the Edgar Award–winning The Bottoms. He has received nine Bram Stoker Awards, the American Mystery Award, the British Fantasy Award, a Critics’ Choice Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, among others. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli.
Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Wool series. The Wool Omnibus Edition won Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award—it has been as high as #1 on Amazon—and forty countries have picked up the work for translation.
Elizabeth Bear, also known as Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky, is an American author known for her speculative fiction. Among her many awards, she is one of only five writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She also won a Sturgeon Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is the author of the acclaimed Eternal Sky series. Elizabeth Bear shares a birthday with Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.
Alastair Reynolds is a bestselling author and has been awarded the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, along with being shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. He was born in Barry, South Wales, and studied at Newcastle and St. Andrew’s Universities to ultimately earn a PhD in astronomy. A former astrophysicist for the European Space Agency, he lives in the Netherlands, near Leiden.
Seanan McGuire is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same ballot for the Hugo Award. In 2022, she managed the same feat again.
Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, four-time Scribe Award winner, Inkpot Award winner, and comic book writer. His vampire apocalypse book series, V-Wars, became a Netflix original series. He writes horror, science fiction, epic fantasy, thriller, and more. He is the president of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and the editor of Weird Tales magazine.
Ken Liu is one of the most lauded authors in the field of American literature. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Locus Sidewise, and Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards, he has also been nominated for the Sturgeon and Locus Awards. His short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” is the first work of fiction to simultaneously win the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. He also translated the 2015 Hugo Award–winning novel The Three-Body Problem, written by Cixin Liu, which is the first novel to ever win the Hugo award in translation. The Grace of Kings, his debut novel, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series set in a universe he and his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, created together. It was a finalist for a Nebula Award and the recipient of the Locus Award for Best First Novel.
Ben H. Winters is the author of World of Trouble, the concluding book in the Last Policeman trilogy. The second book, Countdown City, was an NPR Best Book of 2013 and the winner of the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction. The Last Policeman was the recipient of the 2012 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Mike Resnick (1942–2020) was a multiaward–winning author and editor of science fiction. His awards include five Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. He wrote more than seventy novels and published more than two dozen story collections, as well as mystery novels and screenplays. He was editor and creator of Galaxy’s Edge magazine and edited more than forty fiction anthologies. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages, and his papers are in the Special Collections Library of the University of South Florida in Tampa.
David Farland is the pseudonym of Dave Wolverton, an American author of fantasy fiction who lives in Utah with his wife and five children. He was a budding author during his college years but came to prominence when he won the Writers of the Future L. Ron Hubbard Gold Award for On My Way to Paradise in 1987. He has achieved much renown in the science fiction field, but fans may know him best as the author of Star Wars novels; The Courtship of Princess Leia was met with acclaim from critics and readers alike and became a New York Times bestselling novel.
Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His work has been published in the New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals.
Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films, including Transformers, Star Wars, the first three Aliens films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction, the first science fiction work ever to do so.
Beth Revis is the New York Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe trilogy, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Visit her at bethrevis.com.
Tobias Buckell is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tangled Lands, Crystal Rain, and Halo: The Cole Protocol. His other novels and more than fifty short stories have been translated into seventeen languages. Bucknell has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, the Prometheus, and the Campbell Award for Best New Author. He lives with his family in Ohio.
Rajan Khanna is a fiction writer,
blogger, narrator, and graduate of the 2008 Clarion West Writers Workshop. His
work has appeared in Shimmer Magazine,
GUD, and The Way of the Wizard, amongst others. Rajan lives in New York
where he's a member of the Altered Fluid writing group.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of three previous story collections and eight previous novels, including the Edgar Award–winning Girl in the Glass and the Shirley Jackson Award–winning Shadow Year. A former professor of writing and early American literature, Ford now writes full time in Ohio, where he lives with his wife.
Laura Anne Gilman is the author of the popular Cosa Nostradamus novels, the Nebula
award-nominated Vineart War
trilogy, and the Portals duology, in addition to other works of short
fiction from many fine publishers. She has dipped her pen into the mystery
field as well, writing the Gin &
Tonic series as L. A. Kornetsky. She lives in
New York City where she also runs d.y.m.k. productions, an editorial service
company.
Walter Jon Williams has been nominated for every major science fiction award, including Hugo and Nebula award nominations for his novel City on Fire. His books include The Sundering, The Praxis, Destiny’s Way, the Quillifer trilogy, and The Rift. He lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Kathy Hedges.
Fred Van Lente is a six-time New York Times bestselling comics writer, novelist, and playwright whose work ranges from mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction to superheroes and comedy. His books have received awards from the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the American Library Association. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the playwright Crystal Skillman, and two mostly ungrateful cats. Never Sleep is his third novel.
Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and assistant editor for Lightspeed magazine. Her fiction has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has also been longlisted for storySouth’s Million Writers Award. Christie lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances.