Wil Wheaton first entered the public eye in 1986 with his critically acclaimed performance in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me. He spent his teenage years on the starship Enterprise as a series regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Since leaving TNG, Wil has explored a number of different career options. In 1993, Wil put everything he had in a storage locker at Los Angeles Union Station, and tried life as a hobo, riding the rails across the US.

He settled in Florida in early 1995, where he found work at The Waffle House, on route 90. Wheaton had found his calling, it seemed, until a tragic accident known only as “the pigs-in-a-blanket-fiasco” drove him out of the Waffle House, and, ultimately, out of Florida completely.

Heartbroken and disillusioned, Wheaton returned to Los Angeles, and reclaimed his place in the spotlight by writing clever biographies for former child actors.

Wil is currently a writer and performer with the ACME Comedy Theatre, and was recently called “rather remarkable” by the LA Weekly. Upcoming roles include the romantic lead in the dark comedy “Jane White is Sick and Twisted” and a guest starring lead on PAX TV’s “Twice In A Lifetime”.

Wil currently lives in That Spooky Old House On The Edge of Town. He knows exactly what it is that you’re up to, and your parents are going to get a phone call from him. And don’t make that face. He can see you, mister, and you’re not fooling anyone.

David B. Coe was born on March 12, 1963 (Pisces, Chinese Year of the Rabbit). He grew up in the suburbs just outside of New York City, the youngest of four children. His mother, a school teacher, and his father, a stock broker, instilled in all of their kids a deep love of books, and, as a result, all four of the Coe children grew up to be writers. David’s oldest brother, Bill, is a technical writer with a large computer company in Massachusetts. His sister, Liz, produces and writes television shows in Hollywood. And his second brother, Jim, is a wildlife artist and bird illustrator who has written and illustrated his own field guides.

David received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and then attended Stanford University as a graduate student in United States history. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on conservation policy during the New Deal, receiving his Ph.D. in 1993. For those who have trouble sleeping, his dissertation, “Realms of Nature, Spheres of Interest: Environmental Policy in the Pacific Northwest, 1932 1952″ (Stanford, 1993), is available through University Microfilms, Inc. He briefly considered pursuing a career as an academic, but wisely thought better of it.

More information on the official David B. Coe website.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr., was born in 1943 in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from Williams College under the delusion that poetry was considered respectable and that fantasy and science fiction were not, a mistake he now attributes to youthful enthusiasm.

He has been a delivery boy; a lifeguard; an unpaid radio disc jockey; a U.S. Navy pilot; a market research analyst; a real estate agent; director of research for a political campaign; legislative assistant and staff director for a U.S. Congressman; Director of Legislation and Congressional Relations for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; a consultant on environmental, regulatory, and communications issues; and a college lecturer and writer in residence. In addition to his novels, Mr. Modesitt has published technical studies and articles (generally with boring titles), columns, poetry, and a number of science fiction stories. His first story was published in 1973.

Mr. Modesitt has weathered eight children, a fondness for three-piece suits, a brown Labrador, a white cockapoo, a Siamese rabbit, and various assorted pet rodents. Finally, in 1989, to escape nearly twenty years of occupational captivity in Washington, D.C., he moved to New Hampshire. There he married a lyric soprano, and he and his wife Carol moved to Cedar City, Utah in 1993, where she directs the opera program at Southern Utah University and he continues to create and manage chaos.

More information can be found on his official website.

A brief introduction to me: I was born in 1969 and by 1983 it became clear to me that I had better become a writer because everything else was actual work. Since I graduated from college in 1991, I’ve been a full-time professional writer, sometimes working for others and sometimes working for myself. For the last several years I’ve been working for myself. We’ll see how long that lasts.

side from books, I am also the Chief Entertainment Media Critic for Official US Playstation Magazine, which means I write DVD and CD reviews for the magazine, as well as a column called “Watchdog,” in which I discuss the social and legal issues surrounding video games. I am also frequent writer for my local newspaper, the Dayton Daily News, for which I also write a DVD review column. And if that’s not enough I’m also a paid blogger, working for America Online. You can see my AOL blog at By The Way.

More information on the official John Scalzi website.

Born Feb 14, 1952 in Manchester, England, writer and critic of sf and fantasy also known as Ann Halam, writer of teenage fiction. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards, BSFA short story award, Children of the Night Award from the Dracula Society, Arthur C. Clarke award 2001 for Bold As Love; co-winner of the Tiptree award. Cult status as scriptwriter for the eighties scifi tv cartoon The Telebugs. Lives in Brighton,England with her husband and son, a Tonkinese cat called Ginger and her son Frank.

Substantially more information can be found on the official Gwyneth Jones website.

Margaret Weis was born and raised in Independence, Missouri. She attended the University of Missouri, Columbia, graduating in 1970 with a BA in creative writing. Weis worked for almost thirteen years at Herald Publishing House in Independence, where she started as a proof-reader, ending as editorial director of the trade press division. Her first book, a biography of Frank and Jesse James, was published in 1981. In 1983, she moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to take a job as book editor at TSR, Inc., producers of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS role-playing game.

At TSR, Weis became part of the DRAGONLANCE design team. Created by Tracy Hickman, DRAGONLANCE revolutionized the role-playing industry, introducing such innovative techniques as pre-generated characters, a story line running through numerous game modules, and adult novels that were a direct tie-in with the game. 2004 will be the twentieth anniversary of the DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES. The Chronicles continue to feature on best-seller lists.

Published fantasy works include the Dragonlance series, which has sold over twenty million copies world-wide; the Darksword trilogy; the Death Gate Cycle; Rose of the Prophet; the Soverign Stone trilogy. Science fiction works include her own series, Star of the Guardian, and the Mag Force 7 series.

Weis is owner of Sovereign Press, the publisher of the Sovereign Stone RPG and the new Dragonlance D20 RPG products licensed from Wizards of the Coast. She is co-author of the Dragonlance Core System rulebook, Wizards of the Coast, 2003, and co-author of the Dragonlance Age of Mortals rulebook published by Sovereign Press, 2003.

Weis’s first book in the new series for Tor books, Mistress of Dragons, was released in May 2003 to critical acclaim. She is currently working on the second book in that series, The Dragon’s Son. Weis continues her work in Dragonlance wth a new series of novels for Wizards of the Coast titled Dark Disciple. Movie deals are being pursued on several of her works.

Weis lives in a converted barn in Wisconsin with four dogs: Sasha, a black lab; Kelly, a collie, and Tess and Max, border collies, and three cats, Nicolai Mouseslayer, Motley Tatters, and Shiva, Destroyer of Nations.

More information can be found on the official Margaret Weis website.

Peter Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 2 March, 1943, the first of three sons of a salesman and a nurse. The salesman wanted him to become an athlete, the nurse thought he would do well as either a doctor or a Lutheran minister, but all he wanted to do was to learn to read.

When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy colored paper, he took matters into his own hands and taught himself to read by memorizing his comic books and reciting them over and over to other neighborhood children on the front steps until he could recognize the words. Therefore, when he finally got to first grade to find everyone else laboring over the imbecile adventures of Dick, Jane and Spot (?See Spot run. See, see, see,?), he ransacked the library in search of pirates, soldiers, detectives, spies, criminals, and other colorful souls, Soon he had earned a reputation as an ace storyteller, in demand around campfires and in back yards on summer evenings.

This career as the John Buchan to the first grade was interrupted by a collision between himself and an automobile which resulted in a classic near-death experience, many broken bones, surgical operations, a year out of school, a lengthy tenure in a wheelchair, and certain emotional quirks. Once back on his feet, he quickly acquired a severe stutter which plagued him into his twenties and now and then still puts in a nostalgic appearance, usually to the amusement of telephone operators and shop clerks. Because he had learned prematurely that the world was dangerous, he was jumpy, restless, hugely garrulous in spite of his stutter, physically uncomfortable and, at least until he began writing horror three decades later, prone to nightmares. Books took him out of himself, so he read even more than earlier, a youthful habit immeasurably valuable to any writer. And his storytelling, for in spite of everything he was still a sociable child with a lot of friends, took a turn toward the dark and the garish, toward the ghoulish and the violent. He found his first ?effect? when he discovered that he could make this kind of thing funny.

As if scripted, the rest of life followed. He went on scholarship to Milwaukee Country Day School and was the darling of his English teachers. He discovered Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac, patron saints of wounded and self-conscious adolescence, and also, blessedly, jazz music, which spoke of utterance beyond any constraint: passion and liberation in the form of speech on the far side of the verbal border. The alto saxophone player Paul Desmond, speaking in the voice of a witty and inspired angel, epitomized ideal expressiveness, Our boy still had no idea why inspired speech spoke best when it spoke in code, the simultaneous terror and ecstasy of his ancient trauma, as well as its lifelong (so far, anyhow) legacy of anger, being so deeply embedded in the self as to be imperceptible, Did he behave badly, now and then? Did he wish to shock, annoy, disturb, and provoke? Are you kidding? Did he also wish to excel, to keep panic and uncertainty at arm’s length by good old main force effort? Make a guess. So here we have a pure but unsteady case of denial happily able to maintain itself through merciless effort. Booted along by invisible fears and horrors, this fellow was rewarded by wonderful grades and a vague sense of a mysterious but transcendent wholeness available through expression. He went to the University of Wisconsin and, after opening his eyes to the various joys of Henry James, William Carlos Williams, and the Texas blues-rocker Steve Miller, a great & joyous character who lived across the street, passed through essentially unchanged to emerge in 1965 with an honors degree in English, then an MA at Columbia a year later. He thought actual writing was probably beyond him even though actual writing was probably what he was best at – down crammed he many and many a book, stirred by some, dutiful to the claims of others, and, more important than any of this, educated by the writerly example of his dear, eternal friend, the poet Ann Lauterbach.

Stuffed with books and opinions about books but out of money, he married his beloved, Susan, took a job teaching English at his old school, now renamed University School of Milwaukee, and enjoyed a minor but temporary success as Mr. Chips-cum-jalapenos, largely due to the absolute freedom given him by the administration and his affection for his students, who faithfully followed him as he struck matches and led them into caves named Lawrence, Forster, Bront?Thackeray, etc., etc. On his off-hours, he fell in love with poetry, especially John Ashbery’s poetry, and wrote imitations of same. Three years later, fearing to turn into a spiritless & chalk-stained drudge, he went to Dublin, Ireland, to work on a Ph.D., secretly (a secret even to him) to start writing seriously.

Dublin, 1969-1972. His dissertation, a mess, devolved. He published poems in poetry places, did readings with new friend Thomas Tessier who was writing plays and poems, published two small books of poetry, Ishmael and Open Air, and finally surrendered to psychic necessity and wrote a novel, not at all a good novel, called Marriages, accepted by the first publisher to whom it was, heart in mouth, sent. He moved to the larger world of London.

London, 1972-1979, Ann Lauterbach lived on the other side of Belsize Square; Thomas Tessier soon materialized, magnificently, as the Managing Director of a publishing house. He wrote & wrote & sometime in 1974, in desperation and despair first gathered up his ancient fears and turned them into fiction & by doing so saved his life. He and Ann talked about poetry, the mysteries of everyday life and everything else; he and Tessier talked about H.P. Lovecraft, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and everything else, including the horror movies shown at the Kilburn Odeon. His writing improved. He and Susan bought a house on Hillfield Avenue in Crouch End, N8, and begat their first child, Benjamin, born during the writing of Ghost Story.

In 1979 he returned to America, living first in Westport, Connecticut, where Emma Straub was born, then in New York City, where he and his family inhabit a brownstone on the Upper West Side. He continues to enjoy the crucial friendships of Ann Lauterbach, Thom Tessier, and several others, mainly writers and jazz musicians. At some point he became conscious of the central issues of his life, which recognition made it impossible to cast them into the patterns, however imaginative, of horror literature, as least as conventionally regarded. Horror itself, on the other hand, has not abandoned him, nor can it ever, a matter for which he feels the deepest gratitude. He is a member of HWA, MWA, PEN and the Adams Round Table, and though he is without ?hobbies,? remains intensely interested in jazz, as well as opera and other forms of classical music.

More information at the official Peter Straub website.

Terry Brooks was born in Illinois in 1944, where he spent a great deal of his childhood and early adulthood dreaming up stories in and around Sinnissippi Park, the very same park that would eventually become the setting for his bestselling Word & Void trilogy. He went to college and received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College, where he majored in English Literature, and his graduate degree from the School of Law at Washington & Lee University.

A writer since high school, he wrote many stories within the genres of science fiction, westerns, and non-fiction, until one semester early in his college years he was given The Lord of the Rings to read. That moment changed Terry’s writing career forever, because within the pages of Tolkien’s great work he found all the elements combined in one genre that would allow him to release onto paper his own ideas about life, love, and the wonder that fills this world.

With that new found knowledge he wrote and published The Sword of Shannara in 1977, the grand result from years of trying to retain some form of sanity while studying law at Washington & Lee University. It became the first work of fiction ever to appear on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, where it remained for over five months.

On the spare time he could afford from his law practice Terry wrote The Elfstones of Shannara, which followed in 1982 and once again brought us an epic novel of wonder and adventure in the eagerly awaited sequel to The Sword of Shannara. The Wishsong of Shannara, published in 1985, finished the remarkable trilogy.

After publishing his first three Shannara novels, Terry knew that writing was not only his life’s ambition but that he could make a living with it as well. Even though he was hesitant, he quit his practice of law to pursue a full-time writing career. He moved to Seattle and began writing Magic Kingdom for Sale–Sold!, which began a bestselling new series for him in 1986. After two more Landover novels, The Black Unicorn and Wizard At Large, Terry wrote The Heritage of Shannara, a four-book series returning to the very heart that made him such a success. The publication of The Talismans of Shannara in 1993 concluded that storyline.

One of the idiosyncrasies about Terry is he can’t write in one series for long; he needs, as a creative writer, to take time off from a project which inevitably allows him to explore new mythos and ideas that he is constantly thinking about. In essence, he recharges himself this way so when he comes back to a series it is meaningful storytelling. Rather than start a new Shannara novel after he finished The Heritage of Shannara series, he began writing two more Landover books (The Tangle Box & Witches’ Brew).

Once done with the Landover books, and another foray into the Shannara series with the release of First King of Shannara, Terry decided to create something new. Since the beginning of The Heritage of Shannara series in 1990, Terry had been thinking of a new series; a dark, contemporary fantasy set in a town similar to the Illinois hometown he grew up in. The ideas for this new series grew, expanded, and grew some more over the next several years while he wrote other novels, and in September 1997 Terry released Running With the Demon, his darkest most complex masterwork yet. The story of Nest Freemark and John Ross continued in A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East in what has been tentatively titled The Word & Void trilogy.

In the midst of writing The Word & Void trilogy, George Lucas, the esteemed creator of Star Wars, personally asked Terry if he would write the novelization to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Being a Star Wars fan Terry agreed easily and soon found himself travelling to Skywalker Ranch to discuss the project with Lucas and a month before the theatrical release of the movie the book was published with great success.

It was during this time that Terry decided to have an official website, one that a dedicated fan would devote time towards to ensure that the latest news, touring information, and book summaries could be available to his fans. Terry found his fan. Read that history HERE.

At the moment Terry has returned once again to the Shannara series with a new trilogy titled The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara. The first book, titled Ilse Witch, takes place 130 years after the events of The Talismans of Shannara where Walker Boh is still a Druid and is trying to do something to reform the Druid Council. Antrax and Morgawr finished up the series. Not tired of Shannara, Terry will continue to write three more books that take place 20 years after the events in Morgawr, the first of which is titled Jarka Ruus.

What’s on the horizon after that? Who knows. Rest assured it will be something that only Terry Brooks can bring us.

He lives with his wonderful wife Judine in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and on the road meeting his fans.

http://asimplerway.com/tdp/Terry_Brooks.m3u

Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles. After receiving a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema from UCLA (1968, l969) he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, Calif. advertising and public relations firm.

His writing career began when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster’s in 1968 and much to Foster’s surprise, published it as a short story in Derleth’s bi-annual magazine The Arkham Collector. Sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was bought by Betty Ballantine and published by Ballantine Books in 1972. It incorporates a number of suggestions from famed SF editor John W. Campbell.

Since then, Foster’s sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in all the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several “Best of the Year” compendiums. Six collections of his short form work have been published.

Foster’s work to date includes excursions into hard science-fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, computer games, and the story for the first Star Trek movie. In addition to publication in English, his work has appeared and won awards throughout the world. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science-fiction ever to do so.

Though restricted (for now) to the exploration of one world, Foster’s love of the far-away and exotic has led him to travel extensively. After graduating from college he lived for a summer with the family of a Tahitian policeman and camped out in French Polynesia. He and his wife JoAnn Oxley, of Moran, Texas, have traveled to Europe and throughout Asia and the Pacific in addition to exploring the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya. Foster has camped out in the “Green Hell” region of the Southeastern Peruvian jungle, photographing army ants and pan-frying piranha (lots of small bones; tastes a lot like trout); has ridden forty-foot whale sharks in the remote waters off Western Australia, and was one of three people on the first commercial air flight into Northern Australia’s Bungle Bungle National Park. He has rappelled into New Mexico’s fabled Lechugilla Cave, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi’s Batoka Gorge, driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia, crossed the Andes by car , sifted the sands of unexplored archeological sites in Peru, gone swimming with giant otters in Brazil, and surveyed remote Papua New Guinea and West Papua both above and below the water. His filmed footage of Great White Sharks feeding off South Australia has appeared on both American television and the BBC.

Besides traveling he enjoys listening to both classical music and heavy metal. Other pastimes include basketball, hiking, body surfing, scuba diving, collecting animation on video, and weightlifting. He studied karate with Aaron and Chuck Norris before Norris decided to give up teaching for acting. He has taught screenwriting, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College as well as having lectured at universities and conferences around the country and in Europe. A member of the Science-Fiction Writers of America, the Author’s Guild of America, and the Writer’s Guild of America, west, he also spent two years serving on the Planning and Zoning Commission of his home town of Prescott, Arizona. Foster’s correspondence and manuscripts are in the Special Collection of the Hayden Library of Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.

The Fosters reside in Prescott in a house built of brick salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners’ brothel, along with assorted dogs, cats, fish, several hundred houseplants, visiting javelina, porcupines, eagles, red-tailed hawks, skunks, coyotes, bobcats, and the ensorceled chair of the nefarious Dr. John Dee. He is presently at work on several new novels and media projects.

More information available at the official Alan Dean Foster website.

Reverend G.P. (Graham) Taylor is not your average village vicar. Not every vicar was a police officer. Not every vicar used to work in the high-pressure pop music industry. Not every vicar’s first vicarage is visited annually by thousands of vampires. And not every vicar is a best-selling author. Perhaps it is fitting, therefore, that [...]

Born in 1959 in what is now Toronto, Ed Greenwood is an avid fantasy and science fiction writer, collector, and reader, whose main claim to fame is his creation of The Forgotten Realms??(arguably the largest and most detailed fantasy world-setting ever). ?Ed has been writing about the Realms since the winter of 1967-68, and it has grown into the best-selling Dungeons & Dragons??product line, with copy sales in the tens of millions.? Ed has been hailed as “the Canadian author of the great American novel” (J. Robert King), “an industry legend” (DRAGON??Magazine), and “one of the greats” (GAMES Magazine).? Ed is an award-winning gamer (Best Player, 1984 GenCon??AD&D??Open tournament), writer, and game designer (his fantasy supplements have won several ORIGINS? and Gamer’s Choice? awards, and in 1992 he was elected to the Gamer’s Choice Hall of Fame).? His writings have sold millions of copies worldwide in more than a dozen languages.? Ed has been a guest of honor at over three dozen conventions from Stockholm, Sweden to Melbourne, Australia.

Ed’s published fiction includes over a dozen novels, over thirty short stories, and several bestselling collaborative novels.? Computer game enthusiasts will find Ed’s short story “Moonrise Over Myth Drannor” in the Myth Drannor? Forgotten Realms computer game from SSI, Inc., and his short story “Living Forever” in the Pools of Radiance II: Ruins of Myth Drannor computer game from Mattel Interactive/The Learning Company/Broderbund.? Ed was one of the writers of the classic Interplay computer game The Two Towers, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.? Ed’s lore was used in over a dozen SSI games and the bestselling Baldur’s Gate, Tales of the Sword Coast, and Baldur’s Gate II games and supplements from Interplay/Black Isle/BioWare.? Almost all of the Forgotten Realms game and fiction products, from comics (from TSR, Inc. and two long-running series published by DC Comics, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms; Ed appeared as himself in three issues) to computer games, are based on Ed’s suggestions and lore-notes or his direct work as a “behind-the-scenes consultant.”? Ed is currently assisting in the preparation of a Forgotten Realms television series.

Ed’s Band of Four novels for Tor Books, The Kingless Land, The Vacant Throne, A Dragon’s Ascension, and The Dragon’s Doom are solid bestsellers, with a new novel, set in the same world, The Silent House, due out in 2004.? Most recently, he has signed a deal with Wizards of the Coast to write five more new Forgotten Realms novels.

Ed grew up in North York, Ontario, Canada, holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree (Honors: Journalism) from Ryerson Polytechnic University, and lives on a farm near Cobourg, Ontario?with (among other things), well over 40,000 books.

The following excerpt was taken from Andrew’s website.

Let’s start from the start. Where did you grow up?

North Miami Beach, Florida. It’s one of the suburbs north of Miami in Miami-Dade County. Actually, I was born in Miami Beach, which has more cultural zing! to it than North Miami Beach (which, to my knowledge, has never been famous for anything, other than being the home of Corkie’s Delicatessen, which has since relocated to Pembroke Pines, Florida). The Miami Beach of 1964 (or 1974, or 1984, for that matter) was much different from the Miami Beach of today. Back then, it was a faded, down-at-the-heels resort (see the Frank Sinatra movie A Hole in the Head for a good portrayal). When I was a kid, my family would take me down to South Beach for hamburgers at Lum’s and walks on the old fishing pier. I was entranced by the old Art Deco hotels, all painted with coats of cheap, brown paint; the skimpy, eroded beach, which was always empty; the dry swimming pools behind lots of the hotels, drained when the winter season was over (yeah, J. G. Ballard and I have that little fascination in common); and the dozens of elderly Jewish retirees spending their sunset years parked on folding chairs on hotel porches. One of these days I’d like to write the great Miami Beach fantasy novel.

What were your early influences?

Monster movies. One of my earliest memories is being taken to see Destroy All Monsters at the drive-in movie theater by my parents in 1968; I was three years old. The image that sticks in my head is Baby Godzilla (Minya) staring at the evil aliens through a porthole in their space fortress. That got me hooked. TV was full of monster and fantasy movies back then. Adventure Theater on Saturday afternoons alternated between Buster Crabbe’s Tarzan movies and Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad extravaganzas. Then, every Saturday night at 11 P.M. (I took naps so I could stay up late), Creature Features cycled through the Universal monster series, the 1950s giant bug movies (there was no end to the number of times I could happily sit through Tarantula or The Deadly Mantis), and all those spooky atomic holocaust/end-of-the-world flicks (The World, the Flesh, and the Devil; Panic in the Year Zero; I Was a Teenage Caveman). But the movies that really pushed my buttons were the Planet of the Apes films. The first one I saw in the theater was Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which really creeped me out (but in a good way). That scene where the telepathic mutants peel off their masks still holds up as genuinely horrific. I saw all the rest of the series in the theaters, then caught the short-lived TV series. I talked my parents into buying me all the stuff Planet of the Apes tree-fort village and action figures; pajamas; trash can; Super-8 mini-films; and, best of all, the forty dollar Don Post Cornelius mask, which helped me live out my fantasy of transforming into Roddy McDowell.

Along with the monster movies came the magazines all about monster movies. I loved Famous Monsters of Filmland, especially the issues that reprinted great old articles about King Kong or any of Ray Harryhausen’s films. My mom got me a subscription to The Monster Times, which gratifyingly concentrated on Japanese monster movies, a topic that Famous Monsters didn’t pay much attention to. Plus, The Monster Times had poster centerfolds of classic movie posters that I could trace with tracing paper.

I pretty much learned to read through comic books. An older cousin used to keep copies of Marvel Tales, which reprinted the Steve Ditko and John Romita Spider-Man stories, in a rack in his bathroom, and I used to look through them whenever I visited. My father started buying me Iron Man comics. My mom knew I liked monsters, so she bought me Werewolf by Night and Tomb of Dracula, and my step-dad had good memories of the Timely Comics from the early 1940s, so he bought me Captain America and Marvel Triple Action (which reprinted early Avengers and Captain America stories). I pretty much stuck to Marvel Comics, although I tried out some DC stuff early on. Denny O’Neil’s Detective Comics was too noir and adult for me, and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics seemed too weird (although I liked The Demon). My favorite DC books were the issues of Justice League of America where the Justice League teamed up with the Justice Society from Earth Two, but these team-ups didn’t happen often enough to entice me into becoming a regular DC reader. One DC book sticks out in my mind; I don’t have it in my collection anymore, unfortunately. It was an issue of either Superman or Action Comics whose cover featured Superman being transformed into a tree, his feet becoming rooted to the ground and his fingers turning into branches. I must’ve been six or seven years old when I saw that cover, but I distinctly remember it giving me a little tingle, a thrill I wouldn’t get from a comic book again until I was a pre-teen hunting down reprints of Fantastic Four that featured Jack Kirby’s gorgeous, busty Medusa. Superman turning into a tree. . . go figure.

I also loved naval history, particularly anything to do with battleships or ironclads. In fourth grade, I checked out American Heritage’s Ironclads of the Civil War from my elementary school library so many times that the librarian called my mother in and begged her to buy me my own copy, so other kids would have a chance to check out the book.

http://asimplerway.com/tdp/Andrew_Fox.m3u

Zahn was born and raised in the Chicago area.? He earned a B.S. in Physics from the University of Michigan in 1973 and an M.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois in 1975.? Zahn began writing science fiction in 1975 as a hobby.? As he worked towards his doctorate in physics, he began to devote more of his time to writing.? In 1978, he sold his first short story to Analog.? He was considering taking a year off to write after his doctorate when his thesis advisor died suddenly in mid-1979 (coincidentally, the same day he sold his second story).

In 1980, he left the university to begin his year of full-time writing.? His wife Anna was working full-time to support him during this endeavor.? He wrote 18 stories in that year and brought in $2,000 (doubling the goal he had set of $1,000).? He knew he could earn a living at writing eventually, but it took him until 1984 to achieve that goal.

His best known work is The Thrawn Trilogy, the Star Wars novels that actually revived flagging interest in the Star Wars universe.? He won a Hugo award in 1984 for the novella Cascade Point and has been nominated for Hugos on two other occasions.? He currently lives with his family on the Oregon Coast.

http://asimplerway.com/tdp/Tim_Zahn.m3u

Terry Pratchett published his first story when he was thirteen and had his first commercial sale four years later. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Before turning to literary writing full-time, he worked for many years as a journalist and press officer. His first book in the Discworld series, The Color of Magic*, appeared in 1983. Since that time he has written an additional twenty-five Discworld novels. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a long-time best-seller as well. He has also written two science fiction novels and seven for younger readers.

Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett received the British Fantasy Award for best novel ( Pyramids), in 1989, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 1998, and received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Warwick in 1999. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 21 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 27 languages. Terry Pratchett lives in England with his family, and spends most days at his computer, writing.

More information on the official Terry Pratchett website.

*That’s Colour of Magic for all you Brits.

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Gregory Benford — physicist, educator, author — was born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 30, 1941. In 1963, he received a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma, and then attended the University of California, San Diego, where he received his Ph.D. in 1967. He spent the next four years at Lawrence (Calif.) Radiation Laboratory as both a postdoctoral fellow and research physicist.

Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experiment, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.

He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and has served as an advisor to the Department of Energy, NASA and the White House Council on Space Policy. In 1995 he received the Lord Foundation Award for contributions to science and the public comprehension of it.

In 1989 Benford was host and scriptwriter for the television series A Galactic Odyssey, which described modern physics and astronomy from the perspective of the evolution of the galaxy. The eight-part series was produced for an international audience by Japan National Broadcasting.

Benford is the author of over dozen novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Great Sky River, and Timescape. A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature.

Many of his best known novels are part of a six-novel sequence beginning in the near future with In the Ocean of Night, and continuing on with Across the Sea of Suns. The series then leaps to the far future, at the center of our galaxy, where a desperate human drama unfolds, beginning with Great Sky River, and proceeding through Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and concluding with Sailing Bright Eternity. At the series’ end the links to the earlier novels emerge, revealing a single unfolding tapestry against an immense background.

His television credits, in addition to the series A Galactic Odyssey, include Japan 2000. He has served as scientific consultant to the NHK Network and for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

More information on the official Gregory Benford website.

Michael A. Stackpole [ 9:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I was born in Wausau, Wisconsin in late 1957 to Jim and Janet Stackpole. I remember little of my time in the dairy state, primarily because I spent the first six months of my life lobbying my parents to return to Vermont, which they did when my father’s internship was finished. (My father is a Pediatrician and my mother was a teacher before becoming a politician and active in a variety of programs in the community.)

After the return to Vermont my brother Patrick was born and, four years after that, my sister Kerin was born. Patrick is career military, having graduated from West Point. My sister is a lawyer and quite good at what she does. (I find it rather comforting to know that in my family I can get good medical advice, good legal advice, and good military advice, all of which are vital in my trade.)

Not having been born in Vermont caused a limited amount of childhood trauma for me, since, according to good old Yankee wisdom, I was not truly a Vermonter. (As is commonly noted, if someone is baking cookies in an oven and a puppy crawls in there and is cooked, that doesn’t make it a cookie.) I got over this trauma. In my teen years my rebellion against my parents took the form of listening to Boston Bruins hockey games on a transistor radio when I was supposed to be doing homework. I was, as you can see, a real rakehell.

I graduated from Rice Memorial High School in 1975 and went from there to the University of Vermont. I graduated from there in 1979 with a BA in History. Having already sold my first gaming project to Flying Buffalo Inc. in 1977, I headed west to the land of Mexican food, where it seldom snows, and the snow never lasts long enough to be shoveled. I have lived in Arizona ever since, save for a four month stint in Hartford, CT, working as a consultant for Coleco Industries.

In 1987 FASA Corporation hired me to write the Warrior trilogy of BattleTech novels and the rest, as we historians are fond of saying, is history.

Visit Michael A. Stackpole’s website for more information

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