Ann Leckie is a graduate of Clarion West. Her fiction has appeared in Subterranean Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons. She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis.

  Since publishing his first story in F&SF in 2000, Alex Irvine has written four novels—A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier, The Narrows, and Buyout. Jades won the International Horror Guild, Locus, and Crawford awards in 2001. He has also written three novellas: The Life of Riley, Mystery Hill, and Mare Ultima (of which “Dragon’s Teeth” is a part). His short fiction is collected in Unintended Consequences and Pictures from an Expedition. Irvine’s comic and media-related works include Daredevil Noir, The Vertigo Encyclopedia, and The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits, and Ghouls. He teaches at the University of Maine.

  In addition to working as a doctor, Sara Genge writes speculative fiction for the sleepless mind. SF, fantasy, slipstream or none of the above—she doesn’t really care what you call it, as long as she enjoys writing it and you enjoy reading it. Sara lives in Madrid and enjoys a cat-free life. www.saragenge.com

  Lucius Shepard lives and works in Portland OR. Upcoming works include a novella collection, Five Autobiographies, and a novel, Beautiful Blood.

  Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2002, after the publication of her first novel The King’s Peace, and the World Fantasy Award in 2004 for Tooth and Claw. Her most recent books are the Small Change trilogy of alternate history novels, Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown, and she has a new fantasy novel Among Others forthcoming in June 2010 from Tor. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the books and food are more varied.

  John Meaney is the author of the gothic SF/fantasy crossover novels, Bone Song and Black Blood, and of the space opera trilogy comprising Paradox, Context and Resolution, plus the standalone To Hold Infinity. Currently he is working on a massive hard-SF trilogy and a sequence of near-future, violent satirical thrillers. His novels and short fiction have been three-time finalists for the British SF Award, won the Independent Publishers Best Novel award (in SF/fantasy) and been one of the Daily Telegraph Books of the Year (first choice in SF/fantasy). Now a full-time writer, he has taught business analysis and software engineering on three continents, holds a black belt in shotokan karate, and is a trained hypnotist. He adores cats, loves chocolate, and drinks cappuccinos by the gallon.

  Paul Park is the author of ten novels in various genres, and a collection of short stories. He lives in Berkshire County with his wife and children, and teaches part-time at Williams College.

  Robert Charles Wilson is the author of more than a dozen books, including the Hugo Award-winning novel Spin. He lives outside Toronto, Ontario, with his wife Sharry. His most recent novel is Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America.

  Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are Pinion from Tor Books, The Baby Killers from PS Publishing, and The Sky That Wraps from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

  John Langan is the author of Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008), which was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, and House of Windows (Night Shade 2009). His stories have appeared in John Joseph Adams’s By Blood We Live (Night Shade 2009) and The Living Dead (Night Shade 2008) and Ellen Datlow’s Poe (Solaris 2009), as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, son, and a couple of neurotic cats.

  Eugene Mirabelli writes novels, short stories, journalistic pieces on politics, economics and culture, as well as book reviews. He’s a Nebula Award nominee, has been awarded a Rockefeller Grant, and his fiction has been published in French, Czech, Hebrew, Russian, Sicilian, and Turkish. Although he writes science fiction short stories, his novels are straight literary fiction, as in The Passion of Terri Heart, or his most recent work, The Goddess in Love with a Horse.

  Paul McAuley worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University before becoming a full-time writer. His latest novels are The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. He lives in North London.

  Rachel Swirsky is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where she learned to be cold and the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle where she learned to be rained on. Currently, she lives in Bakersfield, California, where hundred-and-fifteen-degree summer days are teaching her to wish she was cold and/or rained on. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine, and has been collected in year’s best anthologies edited by Strahan, Horton, and the VanderMeers.

  Nir Yaniv is an Israeli writer, editor and musician. His stories were published in several printed and online magazines in Israel and outside it. His story collection, One Hell of a Writer, was published by Odyssey Press in 2006. In 2009, two books he co-wrote with Lavie Tidhar were published: Fictional Murder (Odyssey Press, Israel) and The Tel Aviv Dossier (Chizine Publications, Canada). A collection of his translated short stories, The Love Machine & Other Contraptions, is due to be published in the US in 2010 by RedJack. Nir founded the first Israeli online sf/f magazine, then went on to edit Israel’s only pro speculative fiction magazine, Dreams in Aspamia. As a musician he has performed in several jazz festivals, was the lead singer and/or bassist of several rock and funk groups, and is an a-capella machine on acid. He lives in Tel Aviv, where he records his music in his own studio, The Nir Space Station. His home site (including stories, articles and free music): www.nyfiction.org

  Dominic Green used to work for a British bank, but has been Displaced. He now hangs around libraries stinking up the place. He has mainly been published in Interzone, the world’s best science fiction magazine—reading which will put hairs on your chest whether you are a man or a woman—since 1996. He was nominated for a Hugo award in 2006 for The Clockwork Atom Bomb, but cannot get literary agents or publishers to recognize his existence, no matter how many members of their families he kidnaps. For this reason, he puts novels online on the British website ABCTales.com, where they can be read for free—Saucerers and Gondoliers and Sister Ships and Alastair, two SF novels for younger readers, and Abaddon, which is for older readers with very strong stomachs. A third book in the Saucerers series is on the way.

  Damien Broderick is an Australian sf writer and critic, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, currently living in San Antonio, Texas. He has published more than forty books, including Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction, x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction, Unleashing the Strange, and Chained to the Alien. His latest sf novel was the diptych Godplayers and K-Machines, and his recent sf collections are Uncle Bones and The Qualia Engine.

  Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, The Labyrinth, and crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Spectrum Awards, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs.

  Rodrigo Garcia y Robertson was born in 1949. He has a Ph.D in history and has taught at UCLA and Villanova. His first short fiction, The Flying Mountain, was published in 1987 and he has published about fifty short stories, novelettes and novellas. His first novel, The Spiral Dance, was published in 1991 and he has published eight novels as well as a short story collection. He lives in Washington State.

  Nancy Kress is the author of twenty-six books: three fantasy novels, twelve SF novels, three thrillers, four collections of short stories, one YA novel, and three books on writing fiction. She is perhaps best known for the “Sleepless” trilogy that began with Beggars in Spain. The novel was based on a Nebula- and Hugo-winning novella of the same name. She won her second Hugo in 2009 in Montreal, for the novella “The Erdmann Nexus.” Kress has also won three additional Nebulas, a Sturgeon, and the 2003 John W. Campbell Award (for Probability Space). Her most recent books are a collection of short stories, Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press, 2008); a bio-thriller, DOGS (Tachyon Press, 2008); and an SF novel, Steal Across the Sky (Tor, 2009). Kress’s fiction, much of which concerns genetic engineering, has been translated into twenty languages. She often teaches writing at various venues around the country.

  Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 103-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, four cats, one husband, and one albino bristlenose plecostomus. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her first four novels were published by Ace Books. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published by Prime Books in 2007. She has written one novel (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the author of some fifteen published novels and over fifty short stories, and has been honored with the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell awards, among others. Her hobbies include rock climbing and playing very bad guitar. She lives near Hartford, CT, with a Presumptuous Cat and a Giant Ridiculous Dog.

  Margo Lanagan’s most recent novel, Tender Morsels, was published to immediate critical success in the US, the UK and Australia, is a Printz Honor book and won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her 2006 collection of speculative fiction short stories, Black Juice, was also widely acclaimed, won two World Fantasy Awards, two Ditmar and two Aurealis Awards, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and also won a Printz Honor, and stories from it were shortlisted for a Hugo, a Nebula, a Theodore Sturgeon, a Bram Stoker, an International Horror Guild Award and a Tiptree. Her third collection, Red Spikes, was the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for older readers, and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the World Fantasy Award, and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She lives in Sydney and is working on another novel.

  Nashville native Toiya Kristen Finley is a freelance writer and editor and former professional graduate student. She has published fiction, creative nonfiction, and academic articles in a variety of venues and is currently venturing into game writing. Her fiction has appeared in Nature, Electric Velocipede, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and Expanded Horizons. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate.

  Kelly Link is the author of three collections, most recently Pretty Monsters. She was also a co-editor, for five years, of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband Gavin J. Grant, and their daughter, Ursula. She and Gavin run Small Beer Press and publish the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Kelly’s stories have most recently appeared in the anthologies Troll’s Eye View and Geektastic. Her website is www.kellylink.net.

  Genevieve Valentine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Federations, and more; her first novel is forthcoming from Prime Books. She is a columnist at Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com

  John Kessel teaches creative writing and literature at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was named a notable book of 1992 by the New York Times Book Review, and Kim Stanley Robinson has called Corrupting Dr. Nice “the best time travel novel ever written.” With James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology; Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology; and most recently, The Secret History of Science Fiction. His recent collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories contains the 2008 Nebula-Award-winning story “Pride and Prometheus.”

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Daniel Abraham, “The Best Monkey” (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume III)

  Daniel Abraham, “Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventure of the Emperor’s Vengeance” (Postscripts #19)

  Chris Adrian, “A Tiny Feast” (The New Yorker, April 20)

  Forrest Aguirre, “The Non-Epistemological Universe of Emmaeus Holt” (Farrago’s Wainscot, July)

  Tim Akers, “A Soul Stitched to Iron” (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume III)

  Camille Alexa, “Shades of White and Red” (Fantasy, April)

  Peter M. Ball, Horn (Horn)

  John Barnes, “Things Undone” (Jim Baen’s Universe, December)

  Stephen Baxter, “Formidable Caress” (Analog, December)

  Stephen Baxter, “Earth II” (Asimov’s, July)

  Peter S. Beagle, “By Moonlight” (We Never Talk About My Brother)

  Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull “Lucky Day” (Shadow Unit)

  Paul M. Berger, “Home Again” (Interzone, April)

  Ilsa J. Bick, “Second Sight” (Crime Spells)

  Damien Broderick, “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide” (Asimov’s, April-May)

  Damien Broderick, “Uncle Bones” (Asimov’s, January)

  Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, and Leah Bobet, “Cuckoo” (Shadow Unit)

  Emma Bull, “Getaway” (Shadow Unit)

  Pat Cadigan, “Truth and Bone” (Poe)

  Adam-Troy Castro, “Gunfight on Farside” (Analog, April)

  Fred Chappell, “Shadow of the Valley” F&SF, (February)

  Catherine Cheek, “Voice Like a Cello” (Fantasy, May)

  J. Kathleen Cheney, “Early Winter, near Jenli Village” (Fantasy, April)

  C. S. E. Cooney, “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden” (Subterranean, Winter)

  Paul Cornell, “One of our Bastards is Missing” (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume III)

  Benjamin Crowell, “The Rising Waters” (Strange Horizons, May 4-11)

  Paul di Filippo, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” (Eclipse Three)

  Graham Edwards, “Riding the Drop” (Jim Baen’s Universe, April)

  Sarah L. Edwards, “The Tinyman and Caroline” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 21)

  Carol Emshwiller, “The Bird Painter in the Time of War” (Asimov’s, February)

  Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” (Clockwork Phoenix 2)

  Karen Joy Fowler, “The Pelican Bar” (Eclipse Three)

  R. Garcia y Robertson, “SinBad the Sand Sailor” (Asimov’s, July)

  Theodora Goss, “Csilla’s Story” (Other Earths)

  Theodora Goss, “The Puma” (Apex Digest, March)

  Eric Gregory, “Salt’s Father” (Strange Horizons, August 3)

  Nicola Griffith, “It Takes Two” (Eclipse Three)

  Paul Haines, “Wives” (x6)

  Merrie Haskell, “Sun’s East, Moon’s West” (Electric Velocipede, Spring)

  Daniel Hatch, “Seeds of Revolution” (Analog, July-August)

  Dave Hutchinson, The Push (The Push)

  Alex Irvine, “Seventh Fall” (Subterranean, Summer)

  Kij Johnson, “Spar” (Clarkesworld, October)

  Richard Kadrey, “Trembling Blue Stars” (Flurb #7)

  Helen Keeble, “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc -or- A Lullaby” (Strange Horizons, June 1-8)

  James Patrick Kelly, “Going Deep” (Asimov’s, June)

  Gary Kloster, “Adam, Unwilling” (Jim Baen’s Universe, June)

  Nicole Kornher-Stace, “The Raccoon’s Daughter” (Fantasy, December)

  Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore, “Blood Dauber” (Asimov’s, October-November)

  Ted Kosmatka, “The Ascendant” (Subterranean, Spring)

  Mary Robinette Kowal, “First Flight” (Tor.com, August)

  Naomi Kritzer, “The Good Son” (Jim Baen’s Universe, February)

  Ellen Kushner, “’A Wild and Wicked Youth” (F&SF, April-May)

  Jay Lake and Shannon Page, “Rolling Steel” (Clarkesworld, April)

  Jay Lake, “Chain of Stars” (Subterranean, Fall)

  John Lambshead, “Storming Hell” (Jim Baen’s Universe, April)

  Margo Lanagan, “Sea-Hearts” (x6)

  Tanith Lee, “Clockatrice” (Fantasy, October)

  Yoon Ha Lee, “The Unstrung Zither” (F&SF, March)

  Tanith Lee, “Comfort and Despair” (Lace and Blade 2)

  David D. Levine, “Aggro Radius” (Gamer Fantastic)

  Marissa K. Lingen, “Five Ways to Ruin a First Date” (Not One of Us #42)

  Rochita Loenan-Ruiz, “Breaking the Spell” (Philippine Speculative Fiction IV)