About Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg’s career stretches back to the pulps and his output is amazing by any standard. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and was named a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 2004 by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He has attended every Hugo Awards ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953. He’s authored numerous novels, short stories, and nonfiction books in various genres and categories. He’s also a frequent guest at conventions and a regular columnist for Asimov’s Science Fiction. His major works include Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, The Alien Years, The World Inside, Nightfall and The Positronic Man with Isaac Asimov, Nightwings, and the seven Majipoor Cycle books. Anthologies he’s edited include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (two volumes), the Alpha and New Dimensions series (both multiple volumes), Universe 1–3 with Karen Haber, Legends I and Legends II, two Nebula Awards anthologies, The Fantasy Hall of Fame (two volumes, the first with Martin H. Greenberg, the second solo), Tales From Super-Science Fiction, Far Horizons, Earthmen and Strangers, and Mutants. The present volume is his forty-eighth anthology as editor.
About Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Bryan Thomas Schmidt is an author and Hugo-nominated editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction. His debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes & Noble Book Club’s Year’s Best Science Fiction Releases. His short stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and online and include stories in The X-Files and Decipher’s WARS. As an editor he has edited books by such luminaries as Alan Dean Foster, Tracy Hickman, Frank Herbert, Mike Resnick, Jean Rabe, and more. He was also the first editor on Andy Weir’s bestseller The Martian.
About Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire is the author of Every Heart a Doorway, the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and several other works, both standalone and in trilogies. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. She was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.
About Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce (1842–ca. 1914) was an American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Ohio, he served in the Civil War and then settled in San Francisco. He wrote for Hearst’s Examiner, his wit and satire making him the literary dictator of the Pacific coast and strongly influencing many writers. He disappeared into war-torn Mexico in 1913.
About Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson (1908–2006) published his first short story in 1928 and produced entertaining, thought-provoking science fiction from then on. The second person named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, he was always in the forefront of the field, being the first to write fiction about genetic engineering (he invented the term), antimatter, and other cutting-edge science. A Renaissance man, he was a master of fantasy and horror as well as science fiction.
About Clifford D. Simak
During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.
Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
About Fritz Leiber
Fritz Leiber (1910–1992)
was equally adept at writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His works
were honored with the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and he was named a
Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also
received the Gandalf Grand Master Award for fantasy writing.
About Philip K. Dick
Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
About Avram Davidson
Avram Davidson (1923–1993) was author of nineteen published novels and more than two hundred short stories and essays collected in more than a dozen books. Davidson won the Hugo Award in science fiction, the Queen’s Award and Edgar Award in the mystery genre, and the World Fantasy Award (three times).
About Roger Zelazny
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995)
was an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as many
short stories. Known for including both mythological characters of different
origins as well as elements from real history, Zelazny is perhaps best known
for The Chronicles of Amber series. He was awarded the Nebula award three times
and the Hugo award six times.
About Connie Willis
Connie Willis is a science fiction writer and winner of eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards—more major science fiction awards than any other writer. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011. She was presented with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2012 and has received a number of other awards, including an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2008. Her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book.
About Brenda Cooper
Brenda Cooper is the author of the Silver Ship series: The Silver Ship and the Sea, Reading the Wind, and Wings of Creation. She has also published many short stories, including a collaboration with Larry Niven, “Ice and Mirrors,” in Scatterbrain.
About Suzanne Palmer
Suzanne Palmer has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Eugie M. Foster Award. Her short fiction has won reader’s awards for Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and was listed in Locus magazine’s Recommended Reading. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including the 35th Annual Year’s Best Science Fiction and volumes two and three of The Best Science Fiction of the Year.
About Ken Scholes
Ken Scholes is the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of five novels and over sixty short stories. His work has appeared in print since 2000. He is also a singer-songwriter who has written nearly a hundred songs over thirty years of performing. Occasionally, in his spare time, Ken consults individuals and organizations on maximizing their effectiveness.Ken’s eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a fundamentalist preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive and community organizer, and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in history from Western Washington University. Ken is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Cornelius, Oregon, where he lives with his twin daughters. You can learn more about Ken by visiting www.KenScholes.com.
About Martin L. Shoemaker
Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer and programmer. As a kid, he told stories to imaginary friends. He couldn’t imagine any career but writing fiction until his algebra teacher said, “This is a program. You should write one of these.” Fast-forward through thirty years of programming, writing, and teaching. He wrote, but he never submitted anything until his brother-in-law read a chapter and said, “That’s not a chapter. That’s a story. Send it in.” It was a runner-up for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and earned him a lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!Shoemaker hasn’t stopped writing since. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in The Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4. He received the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award for his Clarkesworld story “Today I Am Paul,” which continues in Today I Am Carey, published in March 2019. Learn more at http://Shoemaker.Space.
About Neil Hellegers
Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
About Scott Aiello
Scott Aiello has narrated over a dozen audiobooks and is a 2013 Audie Award finalist for his nonfiction narration of Sex and God at Yale by author Nathan Harden. He is a
graduate of the Juilliard School drama division and has since performed and directed various New York plays and has been seen on television
shows such as Person of Interest and Elementary. Before Juilliard, he was
a regular in the Chicago theater circuit.
About Stefan Rudnicki
Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and a multiaward-winning narrator, named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices.
About Dan Bittner
Dan Bittner is an actor and voice talent and winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards for audio narration. He has starred on stage and on the screen, in movies such as Men in Black, Adventureland, and the Producers: The Movie Musical. He has also appeared onstage as Macbeth and Sherlock Holmes in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
About Natasha Soudek
If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness . . . qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.
About Matt Godfrey
Matt Godfrey was raised on O'Connor, Welty, and Lee, and spent most of his teenage years in Yoknapatawpha County. But he traveled wherever the books took him, from Alabama to Tokyo, Twain to Murakami. Now he has the privilege of bringing those books to life as an audiobook narrator. He works in all genres and in a lot of accents, but specializes in his beloved Southern Gothic.
He is a two-time nominee for the Society of Voice Arts & Sciences Awards and the Audiobook Reviewer Listener's Choice Awards. He has a fully equipped home studio and works with major publishers, small presses, and indie authors alike.
About Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Simon Nimoy (1931–2015) was an American actor, film director, poet, musician, and photographer. His most famous role was that of Spock in the original Star Trek series, as well as in multiple film, television, and video game sequels. He began his career in his early twenties, teaching acting classes in Hollywood and making minor film and television appearances through the 1950s, as well as playing the title role in Kid Monk Baroni. He made his first appearance in the rejected Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” in 1965 and went on to play Spock until 1969. Spock had a significant cultural impact and garnered Nimoy three Emmy Award nominations. TV Guide named Spock one of the fifty greatest television characters.
About Noah Michael Levine
Noah Michael Levine is an Audie Award-winning narrator, audiobook producer, actor, and author living in the beautiful Hudson River Village of Nyack, New York. He has narrated over 230 titles and looks forward to recording many more. He truly loves his work. Noah's catalog spans the full breadth of genres, from history, philosophy, science, and literary critique to fantasy, drama, comedy, young adult, thriller, and romance/erotica. Noah is an avid home chef, lover of animals, and is working on his first novel.
About Jesse Vilinsky
Jesse Vilinsky is a classically trained actress and voice actor, having graduated from the USC School of Dramatic Arts and BADA in London. She has lent her voice to numerous film and television projects and has worked on various video games, animation, and commercial projects as well. As a narrator, Jesse has garnered recognition in AudioFile magazine for her expertly voiced characters and ability to bring forth the strength and truth of their stories.
About Jim Meskimen
Jim Meskimen is a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows. He acted in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon for director Ron Howard, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. His television appearances include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Friends, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and Parks and Recreation. He is also a painter, award-winning audiobook narrator, and audiobook director for Galaxy Audio.
About Steven Jay Cohen
Steven Jay Cohen has been telling stories his whole life, and has worked professionally as a storyteller since 1991. A classically trained actor, he has worked both on stage and behind the microphone for most of his career. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Steven now resides in scenic western Massachusetts.
About John Pirhalla
John Pirhalla is award-winning audiobook narrator who has recorded over 300 titles. An Audie and Independent Audiobook Awards finalist, he has won a Reader's Favorite Award, an Adrenaline Award, a OneVoice Award, and an Indie Ink Award. Whether it's science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, or thrillers, he enjoys narrating books with lots of characters, voices, and accents.
About Peter Ganim
Peter Ganim, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an American actor who has appeared on stage, on television, and in film. He has performed voice-over work since 1994.
About Tim Campbell
Tim Campbell, winner of AudioFile Earphones Awards, is a narrator and actor based in Los Angeles, California. He is also a classically trained singer and performs regularly with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Opera Chorus, as well as on studio soundtracks for film and television.
About Bronson Pinchot
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
About James Anderson Foster
James Anderson Foster, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, has narrated audiobooks for a variety of publishers, across nearly all genres, both fiction and nonfiction. In 2015, he was a finalist in three categories for the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Voice Arts Awards—mystery, science fiction, and fantasy.
