Michael Swanwick's first two short stories were published in 1980 and both featured on the Nebula ballot that year. One of the major writers working in the field today, he has been nominated for at least one of the field's major awards in almost every successive year, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and the Locus awards. He has published six collections of short fiction, seven novels—In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel—and a Hugo Award– nominated book-length interview with editor Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is major career retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick.
Norman Spinrad is the author of some twenty or so novels, five or six dozen short stories, a classic Star Trek epsisode, a couple of flop movies, an album's worth of songs, political columns, film criticism, literary criticicsm, mini-cookbooks, autobiography, and a bunch of assorted other stuff. The latest to be written is a new and literarily revolutionary novel called Welcome to Your Dreamtime, in which you, the reader, are the viewpoint character, and sections of which have been published in a weird assortment of magazines as free-standing short stories. The latest to be published is He Walked Among Us, a novel so far ahead of itself that it had to wait until it had become something of the fave rave of a radical viral Internet distribution experiment before any traditional publisher would bring it out in paper.
Influenced by the novels of H. G. Wells, the theme of humans dealing with catastrophe is prominent in the work of John Wyndham (1903–1969). Born in Knowle, Warwickshire, he was the son of a barrister and lived at Edgbaston, Birmingham, until 1911, when his parents separated. Afterward he moved around the country with his mother and younger brother, the writer Vivian Beynon Harris. After school he tried his hand at several jobs including farming, the law, art, and advertising. He began writing science fiction stories, and found a niche for his work in American magazines. In the mid-1930s he had his work published in British magazines and in book form. During World War II he worked as a censor, including active service in France. The novel Day of the Triffids is his best-known work dealing with this subject. Alien invasion, telepathy, mutation, and fantastic events occurring in everyday life are also explored in his work, usually as the catalyst for change in the Earth of his novels.
Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) burst onto the science-fiction writing scene as part of the “New Wave” group of writers in the mid-to late 1960s. His novels This Immortal and Lord of Light met universal praise, the latter winning a Hugo Award for best novel. His work is notable for its lyrical style and innovative use of language both in description and dialogue. His most recognized series is the Amber novels, about a parallel universe which is the one true world, with all others, Earth included, being mere reflections of his created universe. Besides the Hugo, he was also awarded three Nebulas, three more Hugos, and two Locus awards.
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