Other Earths (collection)

About the Authors

Robert Charles Wilson is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Hugo Award-winning Spin and its sequel, Axis, as well as A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Mysterium, Blind Lake, and Bios. His next novel will be Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Born in California, he currently lives near Toronto.

Award-winning novelist Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the best-selling City of Saints & Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the T̈htifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints & Madmen. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Other novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year’s best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His work, both novels and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology and is considered a cult classic, still in print along with his Leviathan original fiction series.

Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool. He holds degrees in mathematics and engineering and has worked as a teacher of math and physics and in information technology. He is also a Chartered Engineer. In 1991, Baxter applied to become a cosmonaut, aiming for the guest slot on Mir eventually taken by Helen Sharman, but fell at an early hurdle. His first professionally published short story appeared in 1987 and his first novel in 1991. Baxter has been a full-time author since 1995, with over forty science fiction novels published around the world. He is the President of the British Science Fiction Association, a Vice President of the H.G. Wells Society, and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. Baxter and his family moved to Northumberland in 2004. His current project is a pair of books describing a catastrophic inundation of the Earth: Flood and Ark.

Gene Wolfe grew up in Houston, Texas, where he attended Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School. He dropped out of Texas A&M and got a CIB in Korea. In 1956, he graduated from the University of Houston. He and his wife, Rosemary, were married that year; they have two sons and two daughters, three grand-daughters, a step-granddaughter and a step-grandson. Wolfe has written The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, The Devil in a Forest, The Book of the New Sun, Castleview, There Are Doors, Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, and others. His work has won two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, the Deathrealm Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, and others. His short fiction is collected in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories, Castle of Days, Endangered Species, Storeys From the Old Hotel, Strange Travelers , Innocents Aboard, and Starwater Strains. A two-volume fantasy, The Wizard Knight, is complete with the publication of The Wizard. He’s been the Guest of Honor at a Worldcon, a World Horror Convention, and a World Fantasy Convention. His latest novel is An Evil Guest.

Liz Williams’ mother is a Gothic novelist, and her father was a part-time conjuror, so she didn’t have a hope. She’s been a science fiction fan since the age of ten, and she started writing seriously about ten years ago. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series was responsible, and she’s still a huge fan of Vance. Other favorites include Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Mary Gentle, George R.R. Martin, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. She now writes full time, but she has had various incarnations. Her background is in history and philosophy of science; having done degrees in philosophy and artificial intelligence at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex, she did a doctorate at Cambridge, graduating in 1993. She held a variety of part-time jobs, including a now-infamous stint on Brighton’s pier as a tarot reader, before full-time work in Kazakhstan. She also spent a year running an IT program at Brighton Women’s Centre, then became a full time writer in 2002.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a Ph.D. in English literature. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions , an anthology she coedited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Her short stories and poems have been reprinted in a number of Year’s Best anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.

Greg van Eekhout’s stories have appeared in places such as Year’s Best Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. His debut novel, Norse Code, will be released in May 2009. Greg lives in San Diego and blogs at http://www.writingandsnacks.com.

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. After getting a Ph.D. in astronomy he moved to the Netherlands to work for the European Space Agency. He turned full-time writer in 2004. He and his wife have returned to South Wales, near Cardiff. His first fiction sale appeared in Interzone in 1990, and he published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. Revelation Space was shortlisted for the BSFA and Clarke awards, and his second novel, Chasm City, went on to win the BSFA. Subsequent works include another six novels, of which the most recent are Pushing Ice (2005), The Prefect (2007), and the far-future space opera House of Suns (2008), as well as the linked novellas “Diamond Dogs,” “Turquoise Days” (2003), and two collections of short fiction, Galactic North and Zima Blue (2006). Forthcoming are stories in Galactic Empires and The Starry Rift. His story in Other Earths stems from a long fascination and love affair with the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries.

Paul Park lives in Massachusetts with his family and occasionally teaches at Williams College. Since finishing four novels set in an alternate version of eastern Europe (the Roumania Quartet—A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World), he has been writing short fiction. “A Family History” came out of a fundraiser for the Clarion West workshops, during which he auctioned off on eBay certain elements of an as yet unwritten story—the theme, the title, the various locations, the characters, the genre, etc. The winners would provide these things, and he would write a story that incorporated them. “A Family History” is the result.

Lucius Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and lives in Vancouver, Washington. His short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, The International Horror Writers Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award. His latest works are a short novel, Softspoken, a career retrospective, The Best of Lucius Shepard, and Viator Plus, a collection of newer work from PS Publishing in Britain.

Benjamin Rosenbaum grew up in Arlington, Virginia. He wanted to be either a superhero, a scientist, or a writer. He didn’t want to be the kind of scientist who carefully studies and contemplates natural phenomena, however; he wanted to be the kind who builds giant ray guns. As for being a superhero, while he does have superpowers, he reports that they are not very impressive, and he could never design a costume to his liking. He therefore decided to be a writer. He says, “Typically, when you ask writers why they write, they look at you dourly and say, ‘I have to. I am driven to do so. If you do not absolutely have to write, spare yourself this misery.’ Not me. I don’t have to write. I write because I love it. I’m grateful for every minute I get to do it. It’s like being a superhero, but you don’t need a costume.”