ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GREGORY BETANCOURT is the author of over thirty published novels. He is presently engaged in extending Roger Zelazny’s celebrated Amber series. Among his other novels are The Blind Archer, Johnny Zed, and Rememory. His short fiction has been published widely. He has edited anthologies. He was one of the founding editor-publishers of the revived Weird Tales magazine, left for a while, and has now returned as publisher and coeditor. He is also founder and owner of Wildside Press, which publishes numerous magazines and has over two thousand books in print. Despite this he finds time to have a family, own a home, and, occasionally, exhale.
P. D. CACEK, a winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award, has her own history with vampires (Night Prayers and Night Players ), angry Native American gods (The Wind Caller), ghosts (Sympathy for the Dead), and erotica (Eros Inter ruptus). Some of her shorter fiction may be found in Weird Tales, Weird Trails, Hotter Blood 13: Inferno, and Night Visions 12. She has also edited one anthology, Bell, Book, and Beyond, and does editorial and production work for various publishers. She is dangerous to be around because she bakes very good cookies which cause editors to gain weight.
GREGORY FROST says he decided to write “Ill-Met in Ilium” after hearing Robert Fagles recite from his translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. He’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula awards among others. His latest book is the short story collection Atack of the Jazz Giants, which Publishers Weekly called “one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”
RON GOULART responded to the request for blurb material: “I seem to be in a vampire mode these days. Glad you caught me before sunrise. My latest novel came out last summer—Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle. Like all of the other five books in the St. Martin’s series, it takes place in the Hollywood of the late 1930s and early 1940s. My latest nonfiction is a trade paperback reprint of The Adventurous Decade, a history of newspaper adventure strips—Dick Tracy, Terry & the Pirates, Flash Gordon, etc.—of the 1930s. The character Hix, as I think I’ve mentioned, has appeared in such novels of mine as Skyrocket Steele, about the strange events surrounding the making of a movie serial in Hollywood in 1941 (and now available again as an e-book) and many short stories. One of them, The Werewolf of Hollywood, I adapted some years back for a George Romero TV show entitled Monsters. Because of the budget, however, it didn’t take place in 1930s Hollywood and Hix got dropped.
SARAH A. HOYT has published over three dozen short stories in venues ranging from anthologies to magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Amazing, and Weird Tales. Her Shakespearean fantasy trilogy earned critical acclaim and the first book was a Mythopoeic Award finalist. Her shape-shifter fantasy novel Draw One in the Dark will be released in November. Her mystery novel Death of a Musketeer, written as Sarah D’Almeida, will also be released in November. Sarah is not now nor has she ever been a communist or a vampire.
TANITH LEE is the world-famous author of The Birthgrave, the Flat Earth Series, and far too many other books to list. Of her recent activities, she writes: “I’m working on volume 3 of the Lionwolf Trilogy: No Flame But Mine. This year [2006] I’ll be writing a third book in the young adult Piratica series; the second book, Piratica 2, will be out February 2006. 2006 will also see publication of my novella Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata (in the Ghost quartet from the Science Fiction Book Club of America) and short stories with Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Asimov’s magazine. A contemporary novel, L’Amber will also finally be released in early 2006. Though this is not fantasy or Science Fiction, it’s easily much more peculiar. A second, unrelated but also bizarre contemporary novel, Greyglass, should follow in the summer.
MIKE RESNICK is the author of more than 50 science fiction novels, 175 stories, 12 collections, 2 screen-plays, and the editor of more than 40 anthologies. He has won five Hugo Awards, and has won other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Croatia, Poland, and Japan. Two of his popular Teddy Roosevelt stories have been nominated for Hugos.
BRIAN STABLEFORD’s recent novels include The Wayward Muse and Streaking. He has translated Paul F’val’s Salem Street, one of the pioneering Black Coat series of crime novels; he will translate another in the series, The Invisible Weapon, in 2006. He recently completed a 400,000-word reference book, Science Fact and Fiction: An Encyclopedia. He hopes to publish his hundredth book late in 2006 or early in 2007, depending on the alacrity of his various publishers.
KEITH TAYLOR is a leading Australian author of historical fantasy, whose work has been appearing since the 1970s. He has written much material set in ancient or early medieval Britain, such as the Bard series (four volumes), but has more recently turned his attention to ancient Egypt. His stories of Khamose the sinister priest of Anubis have been a popular feature in Weird Tales for several years now.
HARRY TURTLEDOVE is an escaped Byzantine historian who writes alternate history, other science fiction, fantasy (much of it historically based), and historical fiction. He is a Hugo and Sidewise winner and a Nebula finalist. His short fiction has appeared in most of the major magazines and many anthologies. He is married to historian and writer Laura Frankos; two of their three daughters are history majors in college. “Environment or genetics?” he asks.
CARRIE VAUGHN is the author of many short stories and the novels
Kitty and the Midnight Hour and
Kitty Goes to Washington. She has a masters in English literature and the Tudor dynasty is one of her favorite periods in history. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and doesn’t ski. Visit her Web site at
www.carrievaughn.com
British-born IAN WATSON has been a full-time writer since 1976 after previously teaching literature in Tanzania and Japan, then Science Fiction and futurology at an art school in Birmingham, England. As a result of nine months spent eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick in 1990, Ian has screen credit for screen story for
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death. Ian’s newest story collection—his tenth—is
The Butterflies of Memories . Currently he’s completing a collection of crazy stories in collaboration with his Italian surrealist chum Robert Quaglia. His Web site with funny photos is at
www.ianwatson.info
CHELSEA QUINN YARBRO remarks: “I’m about to sell Saint-Germain number twenty, and book sale number seventy-nine. And my Italian publisher (Gargoyle Books) is importing me for a publicity tour in March. 2003 Grand Master award from World Horror Association, the second woman to receive it. I’ve been selling fiction since 1968. Web site: Chelsea-Quinn Yarbro.net. If you want something more to work with, like my cats’ names (Butterscotch and Crumpet), do ask me.” Besides that, she is world famous for the Saint-Germain books, which are certainly the most successful vampire series of all time. She has written a great deal of other fiction too, which is listed on her web site.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Darrell Schweitzer has been coeditor of Weird Tales magazine since 1987 and before that did editorial work for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Amazing Stories. With George Scithers he coedited two anthologies, Tales from the Spaceport Bar and Another Round at the Spaceport Bar. He was also somewhat mysteriously responsible for the recent Wildside Press “facsimile” of the April 1933 Weird Trails: The Magazine of Supernatural Cowboy Stories which is either a “concept” anthology (with many of the same contributors as the volume you are holding in your hands) disguised as a reprint of a non-existent pulp magazine or a security leak from another dimension. As a fiction writer he is the author of three novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer and about three hundred published short stories. He has written books about H. P. Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award four times. Despite all this he has a deep and abiding fear that he is actually best known for his limericks.