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Joe Murphy lives with his wife, up-and-coming watercolor artist Veleta, in Fairbanks, Alaska. His fiction has or will appear in: Age of Wonders, Altair, A Horror A Day: 365 Scary Stories, Bones of the World, Book of All Flesh, Clean Sheets, Chiaroscuro, Crafty Cat Crimes, Cthulhu's Heirs, Demon Sex, Full Unit Hookup, Gothic.net, Legends of the Pendragon, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Outside, On Spec, Silver Web, Space and Time, Strange Horizons, Talebones, TransVersions, Vestal Review, and Why I Hate Aliens.
Previously published stones are now on the Internet at Alexandria Digital Literature (www.alexlit.com) and at fictionwise.com. Joe is a member of SFWA, HWA, a graduate of Clarion West '95 and Clarion East 2000.
About "Zappa for Bardog": I really found the guidelines for Low Port interesting. And I've been experimenting with alien points of view. That's how the idea to tell a story through an artificial life form who could read information directly from human DNA came about. Having also been a fan of the late Frank Zappa, I've always wanted to do a tribute story as well. All these things kind of just came together and somehow managed to work.
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Paul E. Martens is a son, a husband, and a father. He has a job. Paul was a first place winner in the Writers of the Future Contest and received an Honorable Mention in the 2001 Best of Soft SF Contest. Other stories have appeared in a variety of print and online magazines. He likes to pretend to be a cynical curmudgeon but he's actually a neurotic optimist.
About "The Times She Went Away": I knew I wanted to write a story for Low Port. I started with a guy like Peter in his middle years (a smuggler, a fence, someone making his living, not exactly on the dark side, but certainly on the crepuscular side), and his kind of wild adopted daughter. I thought the story had potential, but no real plot yet. Then Annie Jones showed up. Once he met Annie, Peter had no choice but to spend his life hanging around the Low Port, waiting for her to come back, and I had my story.
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Douglas Smith's stories have appeared in over 40 professional magazines and anthologies in fifteen countries and thirteen languages, including Amazing Stories, Cicada, Interzone, The Third Alternative, On Spec, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror . In 2001, he was a John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new writer, and won an Aurora Award for best SF&F short fiction by a Canadian. He's been an Aurora finalist eight times and has twice been selected for honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror . In real life, Doug is a technology executive for an international consulting firm. He lives just north of Toronto, Canada. Like the rest of humanity, he is working on a novel. His web site is www.smithwriter.com and his email is doug@smithwriter.com
About "Scream Angel": The genesis of this story was a trip to a circus. Ever since my oldest son, Mike, was about five and until my youngest son, Chris, decided it was no longer cool, we've gone to a circus show that tours Toronto each summer. They just set up in a field near the parking lots of one of the big suburban shopping malls, charge way too much for popcorn and candyfloss, and put on a fair-to-middling show. It's no Vegas, but it was always fun and for a good cause. Chris is physically handicapped, so when he started going, we were given seats reserved for wheelchairs right at ringside. A great view, close enough to really smell the elephants. But being that close let me notice something I'd missed from farther back. All of the performers did double, or even triple, duty as circus hands, setting up equipment, acting as safety catchers, or even shoveling up after the horses and elephants. Seeing the trapeze artist, who had just dazzled the crowd in his spiffy sequined outfit, show up in coveralls cleaning up elephant poop gave me the idea of a down-and-out circus of aliens, just scraping by. I coupled it with another idea about a drug I ended up calling Scream, made the big act a pair of bird-like aliens, and the rest grew out of that.