Eclipse One

by Jonathan Strahan

  She first realised she wanted to be a writer at age fourteen when she won a local newspaper's story competition. She has written a number of highly regarded SF novels, notably White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Cafe, and the near-future fantasy "Bold As Love" series. Her collection Seven Tales and a Fable won two World Fantasy Awards, and her critical writings and essays have appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Foundation, NYRSF, and several online venues. She has also written more than twenty novels for teenagers as Ann Halam, starting with Ally, Ally, Aster and including Taylor Five, Dr. Franklin's Island, and most recently Snakehead. She has been writing full time since the early '80s, occasionally teaching creative writing. Honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Bold as Love and the Philip K. Dick Award for Life. She lives in Brighton, with her husband, son and two cats called Frank and Ginger; likes cooking, gardening, watching old movies and playing with her websites.

  Ellen Klages (www.ellenklages.com) has published more than a dozen stories, including Nebula and Hugo finalist "Time Gypsy," Nebula nominee "Flying Over Water," and 2005 Nebula winner "Basement Magic," all of which are reprinted in her new collection Portable Childhoods (2007). She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. Her first novel, The Green Glass Sea, was short-listed for the Locus Awards and the Quills. It won the Scott O'Dell Award for best American historical fiction. She is currently working on a sequel.

  Margo Lanagan (amongamidwhile.blogspot.com) was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, and has a BA in History from Sydney University. She spent ten years as a freelance book editor and currently makes a living as a technical writer. Lanagan wrote teenage romances under various pseudonyms before publishing junior and teenage fiction novels under her own name, including fantasies Wildgame, Tankermen, and Walking through Albert. She has also written an installment in a shared-world YA fantasy series, The Quentaris Chronicles: Treasure Hunters of Quentaris, and three acclaimed original story collections: White Time, World Fantasy Award winner Black Juice, and Red Spikes. She currently lives in Sydney with her partner and their two children where she is working on a new fantasy novel for young adults.

  Maureen F. McHugh (my.en.com/~mcq/) was born February 13, 1959. She grew up in Loveland, Ohio, and received a BA from Ohio University in 1981, where she took a creative writing course from Daniel Keyes in her senior year. After a year of grad school there, she went on to get a master's degree in English Literature at New York University in 1984. After several years as a part-time college instructor and miscellaneous jobs in clerking, technical writing, etc., she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. It was during this period she sold her first story, "All in a Day's Work," which appeared in Twilight Zone. She has written four novels, including Tiptree Award winner and Hugo and Nebula Award finalist China Mountain Zhang, Half the Day Is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis. Her short fiction, including Hugo Award winner "The Lincoln Train," was collected in Mothers and Other Monsters which was a finalist for the Story Prize.

  Garth Nix (www.garthnix.com) was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, and grew up in Canberra. When he turned nineteen he left to drive around the UK in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher's sales representative, an editor, a literary agent, and as a public relations and marketing consultant. He was also a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve, but now writes full-time.

  His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade's Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series "The Seventh Tower," and most recently the seven-book "The Keys to the Kingdom" series. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  Lucius Shepard (www.lucius-shepard.com) was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1947 and published his first book, poetry Cantata of Death, Weakmind & Generation in 1967. He began to publish fiction of genre interest in 1983, with "The Taylorsville Reconstruction," which was followed by such major stories as "A Spanish Lesson," "R&R," "Salvador," and "The Jaguar Hunter." The best of his early short fiction is collected in two World Fantasy Award-winning volumes, The Jaguar Hunter and The Ends of the Earth. In 1995 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction said of Shepard's relationship to science fiction that "there is some sense that two ships may have passed in the night." Two years later Shepard returned from what he has since described as a career "pause," delivering a series of major short stories, starting with "Crocodile Rock" in 1999, followed by Hugo Award winner "Radiant Green Star" in 2000, and culminating in nearly 300,000 words of short fiction published in 2003. The best of his recent short fiction has been collected in Trujillo and Other Stories, Eternity and Other Stories, and Dagger Key and Other Stories. He has also written the novels Green Eyes, Life During Wartime, Kalimantan, The Golden, Colonel Rutherford's Colt and Floater. His most recent book is new novel Softspoken.

  Bruce Sterling (blog.wired.com/sterling) was born in Texas in 1954, and received a BA in Journalism from the University of Texas in 1976. His first short story, "Man Made Self," appeared the same year. His first two novels, Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid, were far-future adventures, the latter presaging the cyberpunk movement he is credited with creating. Sterling edited cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, considered the definitive representation of the subgenre, and his near-future thriller Islands in the Net won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. In 1990 he collaborated with William Gibson on alternate history novel The Difference Engine. Future history novel Schismatrix introduced his Shaper-Mechanist universe, which pits bioengineering against mathematics, also the setting of some of the stories in collection Crystal Express. After writing the non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown, he returned to fiction with near-future, high-tech scenarios in Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Distraction, and The Zenith Angle. Sterling has produced a large and influential body of short fiction, much of which have been collected in Crystal Express, Globalhead, A Good Old-fashioned Future, and Visionary in Residence. His novelette "Bicycle Repairman" won the Hugo Award and novelette "Taklamakan" won the Hugo and the Locus Award. Sterling's non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Nature, Newsday, and Time Digital. A major career retrospective, Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling, will be published in late 2007.

  Ysabeau S. Wilce (www.yswilce.com) is a new writer whose first story, "Metal More Attractive," was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2004. Like all of her work to date, it was set in "Alta Califa," an alternate California, and is heavily influenced by Wilce's military history studies. A second story, "The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror," appeared in 2005 and "The Lineaments of Gratified Desire" appeared in 2006. Wilce's first novel, a young adult fantasy with a preposterously long title, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, was published to considerable acclaim earlier this year. She currently lives with her husband, a dog, and a large number of well-folded papertowels in Chicago, Illinois, where she is currently working on a second "Flora Segunda" novel.

  THE END

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