Lynn Abbey, ex–New Yorker, ex-Michigander, and ex-Oklahoman, moved to Florida in 1997, which she says is nice, but she misses snow. Her first novel, Daughter of the Bright Moon, was published in 1978. Since then, she has published more than two dozen novels, most of them fantasies. She has been called the “Godmother of Shared Universes” for her part in creating, editing, and writing the Thieves’ World® series of anthologies, novels, and games. Abbey says she writes fantasies because when her imagination gets going, it is full of magic, intrigue, and the colors of a stained-glass window. If science fiction is the fiction of possible futures, then fantasy is the fiction of possible histories.
Robert Lynn Asprin grew up in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. After serving in the army, he got a job as a cost accountant and saw nothing wrong with making a career out of arranging numbers, until he and a few friends wandered into a Society for Creative Anachronism event, where he quickly realized he had a perfect trifecta of talent: disruption, organization, and storytelling. Asprin put these talents to work to found the Great Dark Horde within the SCA, and the Dorsai Irregulars within the science-fiction fandom. The life of a cost accountant had lost its allure, but he had a family to support, so he decided to tell stories for money. Asprin’s first two books, The Cold Cash War and Another Fine Myth, demonstrated that he could write tragedy or comedy, science fiction or fantasy, with equal finesse. Then he got the idea for Thieves’ World® and changed the way authors, publishers, and readers thought about anthologies. Though Asprin died in 2008, the Great Dark Horde, the Dorsai Irregulars, and Thieves’ World® continue to this day.
Lynn Abbey, ex–New Yorker, ex-Michigander, and ex-Oklahoman, moved to Florida in 1997, which she says is nice, but she misses snow. Her first novel, Daughter of the Bright Moon, was published in 1978. Since then, she has published more than two dozen novels, most of them fantasies. She has been called the “Godmother of Shared Universes” for her part in creating, editing, and writing the Thieves’ World® series of anthologies, novels, and games. Abbey says she writes fantasies because when her imagination gets going, it is full of magic, intrigue, and the colors of a stained-glass window. If science fiction is the fiction of possible futures, then fantasy is the fiction of possible histories.
Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart.
Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series.
Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope.
John Brunner started his career as a productive writer of Ace Double Science Fiction novels, sometimes writing both sides of the same double. He produced a wide variety of entertaining and well-conceived science fiction adventures before testing his ambitions with more and more complex and stylistically sophisticated novels. Among his triumphs are Stand on Zanzibar (Hugo winner for Best Novel), The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, and A Maze of Stars. Although he wrote relatively little fantasy, he was widely acclaimed for a series of short stories collected as The Compleat Traveller in Black. Brunner also wrote mysteries, thrillers, and several well-regarded historical novels.
Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana, and grew up in Peoria, Illinois. A voracious reader, Farmer decided in the fourth grade that he wanted to be a writer. For a number of years he worked as a technical writer to pay the bills, but science fiction allowed him to apply his knowledge and passion for history, anthropology, and the other sciences to works of mind-boggling originality and scope.
His first published novella, “The Lovers” (1952), earned him the Hugo Award for best new author. He won a second Hugo and was nominated for the Nebula Award for the 1967 novella “Riders of the Purple Wage,” a prophetic literary satire about a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. His best-known works include the Riverworld books, the World of Tiers series, the Dayworld Trilogy, and literary pastiches of such fictional pulp characters as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. He was one of the first writers to take these characters and their origin stories and mold them into wholly new works. His short fiction is also highly regarded.
In 2001, Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.
