Science Fiction Originals Vol 3 Part 41

Bell holds a master's degree in English literature from Brigham Young University. He enjoys hiking, backpacking, and climbing. He has backpacked through Haleakala Volcano on Maui, from the summit to the sea, retracing an expedition Jack London went on at the turn of the last century. In the fall of 1996 Bell joined an eight-day expedition to the top of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa (19,340'). He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Gene Wolfe: Autobiographical Sketch I was born in Brooklyn, New York. This came home to me, to me who had always called myself a a Texan and thought of myself as a Texan, when I read that Thomas Wolfe warmed up for writing by walking the night streets of Brooklyn. He was from the hill country of northwest North Carolina, and so was my great-great grandfather-making Thomas and me, at least presumptively, distant cousins. Hemingway sharpened twenty pencils and Willa Cather read a pa.s.sage from her bible; but Thomas Wolfe, bless him, swung his big body down Brooklyn streets and may have been thrashing out some weighty problem in Of Time and the River during the early hours of Thursday, the seventh of May 1931. I hope so. I like to think of him out there on the sidewalk worrying about Gene Gant and flaying NYU.

At any rate, I was born in that city on the southwest tip of Long Island. My parents lived in New Jersey at the time, but they moved and moved. To Peoria, where I played with Rosemary Dietsch, who lived next door, and her brothers Robert and Richard. To Ma.s.sachusetts, where little Ruth McCann caught her hand in our car door. To Logan, Ohio, my father's home town, where Boyd Wright and I got stung by the b.u.mble bees in our woodshed. To Des Moines, where a redheaded boy taught me chess while we were in the second grade.

Then to Dallas for a year, and at last to Houston, which became my home town, the place I was "from."

I went to Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School, where we read "The Masque of the Red Death" in fifth grade and learned "The Raven" in the sixth. We lived in a small house with two very large bedrooms; the front room was my parents', the back bedroom, with mint growing profusely beneath three of its six windows, was mine.

I had no brothers or sisters, but I had a black-and-white spaniel called Boots; and I built models (mostly World War I airplanes, which still fascinate me-I have done two stories about them: "Continuing Westward"

and "Against the Lafayette Escadrille") and collected comics and Big Little Books.

The thing I recall most vividly about Houston in the late thirties and early forties is the heat. Houston has almost precisely the climate of Calcutta, and until I was ready for high school there was no air conditioning except in theaters and Sears Department Store. We went to movies during the hottest part of the day to miss it, and when we came out of the theater the heat and sunlight were appalling; my father had to wrap his hand in his handkerchief to open the door of our car.

Our house stood midway between two mad scientists. Miller Porter in the house behind us was my own age but much tougher and cleverer, and built Tesla coils and other electric marvels. Across the street Mr.

Fellows, a chemist, maintained a private laboratory over his garage. He blew himself up once in true comic-book style.

If all this were not enough to make a science-fiction fan of me, there was, only five sweltering blocks away, the Richmond Pharmacy, where a boy willing to crouch immobile behind the candy case could cram Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, or (my favorite) Famous Fantastic Mysteries while the druggist compounded prescriptions.

Almost unnoticed, the big, slow-moving ceiling fans vanished from the stores. The Second World War was over, and there was a room air conditioner in one of my bedroom windows and another in the dining room.

Houston had begun to lose its Spanish-Southern character, and I was in high school, where I showed no apt.i.tude for athletics (the only thing that counted) or much of anything else. I joined ROTC to get out of compulsory softball, and a year later the pappy shooters of the Texas National Guard, because guardsmen got two dollars and fifty cents for attending drills.

To my surprise, the Guard was fun. We fired on the rifle range and played soldier, with pay, for two weeks during school vacation. When the Korean War broke out we thought our outfit, G Company of the One Hundred and Forty-third Infantry, would be gone in a week. It never went; and although I would gladly have continued hanging around the armory waiting for orders, I found myself committed to attending Texas A&M. It offered the cheapest possible college education to Texas boys, and at the time I went there was an all-male land-grant college specializing in animal husbandry and engineering. Only d.i.c.kens could have done justice to A&M as I knew it, and he would not have been believed. It was modeled on West Point, but lacked the aristocratic tradition and the sense of purpose. I dropped out at mid-term of my junior year, lost my student deferment, and was drafted.

I served in the Seventh Infantry Division during the closing months of the war and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. The day-to-day accounts I sent my mother will be found in Letters Home, published by a Canadian small press, United Mythologies.

The GI Bill let me finish my education at the University of Houston. Rosemary Dietsch came to Texas for a visit, and we were married five months after I took a job in engineering development. I stayed on that job for sixteen years, then left to join the staff of Plant Engineering, a technical magazine. Our son Roy was named for my father, whose real name, however, was Emerson Leroy Wolfe; my mother was Mary Olivia Ayers Wolfe. Our daughters Madeleine and Therese have given us granddaughters, Rebecca Marie Spizzirri and Elizabeth Rose Goulding. Our youngest, Matthew, has not yet married, though we nurse hopes.

I began to write in 1956, soon after Rosemary and I were married; we were living in a furnished apartment, and needed money to put down on a bed and a stove. My first sale was "The Dead Man" to Sir in 1965.

I have taught Clarion East and Clarion West, and have taught workshops for Florida Atlantic University. In 1996 I taught a semester of creative writing for Columbia College.

My work has been given three World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Deathrealm Award, and others, including awards from France and Italy.

Although it has never won the Hugo, it has been nominated eight times.

Ian R. MacLeod I was born in Solihull, which is near Birmingham, in the West Midlands of the UK in 1956 and, apart from one or two short excursions up and down the country, have mostly lived in and around Birmingham ever since. My father is Scottish, which accounts for the name, and my mother's family are from the south of Birmingham. They met each other when they were stationed at an East Coast town during the Second World War. I have an elder bother and sister.

At school, my academic career was unimpressive, and I was generally graded with the bottom half of pupils at infant and junior school. Unsurprisingly, I failed my "eleven plus" exams, and I went to Light Hall Secondary School. But it was a decent school with a good headmaster, and I gradually drifted up the streams until, at fifteen, I sc.r.a.ped enough grades to clamber across and join some of the posher and cleverer kids in Harold Malley Grammar School, and thus continue into higher education. For no particular reason other than that I liked the whole idea of books and huge dusty libraries, and to stop being bothered by the careers master, I elected to study law afterwards, and was persuaded by the interviewer at Birmingham Polytechnic, my local college, to do a proper degree rather than take a lesser and more specifically job-related qualification.

My reading was avid throughout my early and mid teens, and consisted almost entirely of science fiction. I had little reason or cause to read "proper literature." This was in the days of the New Wave, and of 2001, of Dune and Zelazny and Delany and Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions-I sucked it all up. Here, I was sure, was something that was new and daring. Then I read Tolkien, and fell in love with his books, too, and Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy. Eventually, I was required to read some of the modern cla.s.sics at grammar school for A level English. D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot soon made a big impression on me, whilst at the same time I was still reading and adoring Ballard and Silverberg. I rather fancied the idea, in fact, of doing what they did, of combining the two streams. Thus, at the age of about fifteen or so, began my first abortive attempt at writing a novel. It was set in an alternative world where the Third Reich really had lasted for a thousand years.

College, and law, turned out to be more enjoyable than I'd really expected. I read less, wrote nothing, listened to a lot of music, and went out a lot. I also met my wife Gillian. I got a lower second honours degree without too much effort: the professional law exams, though, weren't for me, although Gillian sailed through them and became a solicitor. I still had no idea what was for me, but, after drifting through various jobs, I ended up working in the Civil Service by my early twenties. It was there, on a hot afternoon and with the old bloke in the desk opposite nodding off to sleep in the sunshine, that I finally grew bored enough to set aside the file I'd been pretending to study, and put biro to a sc.r.a.p of paper. Soon, my efforts grew more serious.

Life-the life of work and seeming adulthood-didn't seem enough on its own, and I was never one for heading out on wild adventures, apart from those which took place in my head. Within a year or so, I was at work on the novel which was to see me through the rest of my twenties. When it was finished, and after I'd learnt typing, I sent it off to various publishers, fully expecting fame and riches.

A few years, and another couple of half-done and unsold novels later, I found myself working on the odd short story-a genre I'd previously avoided because, with the exception of SF, I preferred reading novels.Unsurprisingly, and like my novels, most of these short stories seemed to fit broadly into what I thought of as science fiction, which also meant horror and fantasy and anything else which took my fancy. I refocused a little bit more on the genre when I realised-or remembered-that there were magazines out there, those fabled names which I'd noticed in anthologies during my childhood but had never been able to find, magazines which bought and paid for short science fiction. I still managed to get a lot of my writing done on or under the desk at work in the Civil Service, and largely stuck with the job because it gave me the time and the leisure to write, both at work and at home. Despite, or perhaps because, of this, my Civil Service career progressed well-or did until I found the whole idea of being seen as a high-flyer, whilst at the same time having another objective in my life about which I remained almost entirely secretive, got to me.

Meanwhile, and by now in my mid-thirties and probably heading for some kind of crisis or breakdown, I was starting to get encouraging replies to my submissions to SF magazines. My first sale was to one of the most fabled names of all-Weird Tales. Then I sold to Interzone. Then to Asimov's. All of this was a big thrill.

After all-I was a writer! When Gillian became pregnant, I was very happy to give the idea of being a full-time house-husband and writer a bash.

That was in 1990. Since then, I've sold about 30 short stories to most of the main SF markets, including F&SF, Amazing, Interzone, Asimov's, Weird Tales, Pulphouse, Pirate Writings, etc., along with a few articles and poems, many of which have been repeatedly anthologised. Funnily enough-or weirdly-my very first sale, "1/72nd Scale," was nominated for the Nebula Award for the year's best novella. I also managed to sell separate stories to the Year's Best SF and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror in my first full year of being published. Since then, I've continued to make almost annual appearances in the Year's Best SF, and about every other year in the Best Horror. I've also been nominated for the British Science Fiction a.s.sociation Award, and the James Tiptree Award. My work has been translated into many languages, including Italian, French, j.a.panese, Polish, and German.

Having switched to writing short fiction, it's taken me a long time to get far with novels-and even longer to sell them! However, my first novel, The Great Wheel, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1997, and won the Locus Award for the Year's Best First Novel. A second, an alternative history ent.i.tled The Summer Isles, remains unpublished at full length, but has received the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award in abridged novella format. I'm a slowish worker, but almost everything which I've finished to my own satisfaction in this decade has found a decent market. A short story collection ent.i.tled Voyages By Starlight was also published in 1997 by Arkham House. I'm currently at work on a third novel set in a world close to our own where magic is the main driving force of the industrial revolution. Meanwhile, as my house-husband duties became less demanding when our daughter Emily went to school, I started teaching adult literacy part time at local adult education centres, and more recently also creative writing and English skills and other stuff at Aston University. This is good work-it gets me out of the house, remains a fresh challenge, and is a great antidote to the essentially navel-gazing task of writing fiction. I just wish I had more time to fit everything in.

Simon Ings I wrote four science fiction novels (Hothead, In the City of the Iron Fish, Hotwire, Headlong) before changing direction last year with Painkillers, a novel with sf undertones set in contemporary London. (The paperback was published by Bloomsbury in April of this year.) I live in London and make a crust reviewing books for the New Scientist and the TLS.

I ran my first marathon two weeks ago and-by the time your readers read this-I'll be walking across Corsica on the mountain paths of the GR20. If publication's due on 6 June, then according to my guide, I'll be climbing the Peak of the d.a.m.ned Soul.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of The Physiognomy-winner of the World Fantasy Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year-and Memoranda-also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. These novels are the first two parts of a trilogy that has now been completed with the publication of The Beyond in January 2001. Ford's short fiction has appeared in Event Horizon, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, s.p.a.ce & Time, The Northwest Review, and MSS. His story "At Reparata" was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Thirteenth Annual Collection, and "The Fantasy Writer's a.s.sistant,"

which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was nominated for a Nebula award in 2001.

Presently, he is working on a novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, for Morrow and a collection of his short stories, The Fantasy Writer's a.s.sistant and Other Stories, for Golden Gryphon Press. Both books should be out some time next year. For the past twelve years, he has taught Research Writing, Composition, and Early American Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He lives in Medford Lakes with his wife and two sons.

Michael Ca.s.sutt has been writing and producing award-winning television since 1985. He was co-executive producer of the Showtime revival of The Outer Limits, which won the CableACE for best drama series in 1995.Actor Beau Bridges and director Stuart Gillard were also honored for their work in the two-hour premiere Outer Limits episode, "Sandkings," which was later released as a film.

Among his other credits: staff writer for The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1986), story editor for the acclaimed Max Headroom series (ABC, 1987, more recently re-run on the Sci-Fi channel), and producer for the CBS series TV-101 (1988-89), for which Ca.s.sutt won the Nancy Susan Reynolds Award of the Center for Population Options for a three-part episode called "First Love."

Ca.s.sutt was also writer and producer for WIOU, an ensemble drama starring John Shea and Helen Shaver (CBS, 1990-91), and then for Eerie, Indiana (NBC 1991-92). In 1992-93 Ca.s.sutt was producer and writer for the ABC police drama Sirens, and also wrote the two-part premier of its syndicated version (1994). He then worked on the first season of The Outer Limits. Most recently Ca.s.sutt was co-executive producer for the FBC drama Strangeluck (1995-96) and consulting producer on Beverly Hills, 90210 (1997-98) and Seven Days (1998-99).

He has recently contributed freelance scripts to Stargate SG-1 and Farscape, and has developed scripts based on cla.s.sic SF by writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford Simak, and Philip Jose Farmer, each one-for different reasons-still unproduced.

Ca.s.sutt is also a writer of fiction. His historical thriller, Red Moon, about the dark side of the s.p.a.ce race between America and the Soviet Union, was published by Forge Books in February 2001. His NASA novel Missing Man was published in September 1998, to universal praise from such diverse sources as Publishers Weekly, a.n.a.log Science Fiction, and the muckracking NASA Watch, which said, "This is a book about loyalty to NASA and loyalty to the truth, and what happens when these issues collide against a backdrop of the risky business of s.p.a.ceflight and suspicious lethal accidents."

Ca.s.sutt has published two previous science fiction and fantasy novels, The Star Country (Doubleday, 1986) and Dragon Season (Tor Books, 1991). With Andrew M. Greeley, he co-edited an anthology of SF-fantasy stories with Catholic themes, Sacred Visions (Tor Books, 1991). He is also the author of over two dozen published short stories, most recently "The Longer Voyage" (selected for reprinting in The Year's Best Science Fiction, 1995).

Ca.s.sutt is also an experienced writer of nonfiction, not only contributing articles to such magazines as s.p.a.ce Ill.u.s.trated, s.p.a.ce World, and books such as Magill's Survey of Science: s.p.a.ce Exploration Series, but as the author of the biographical encyclopedia Who's Who in s.p.a.ce. The third edition of Who's Who in s.p.a.ce was published in January 1999 by Macmillan Reference. The book contains biographies and photos of seven hundred astronauts and cosmonauts from around the world, for which Ca.s.sutt conducted dozens of interviews over a period of ten years.

His most recent work in this field is Deke!: From Mercury to the Shuttle, the autobiography of the noted astronaut, test pilot, and Apollo program manager Donald K. "Deke" Slayton (Forge Books, 1994). In February 1997 Deke! was selected by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ronald Fogleman as one of the "essential books" in the library of any Air Force officer. Ca.s.sutt is currently working on a book with former Gemini and Apollo astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, and is under contract to write Deep Black and Air Force Blue: America's Military Manned s.p.a.ce Programs for the Texas A&M University Press and NASA Centennial of Flight series.

Born in Minnesota and raised in Wisconsin, Ca.s.sutt attended the University of Arizona in Tucson and graduated in 1975 with a B.A. in radio-television. He has worked as a disc jockey and radio program director and as a network television executive for CBS. He has been a full-time writer since 1985. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Cindy, and two children, Ryan and Alexandra.

Dave Hutchinson was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in December 1960. He graduated from Nottingham University with a degree in American Studies, and then became a journalist. He lives in North London with his wife, Bogna, and their two cats, Dougal and Kuron.

James P. Blaylock grew up in southern California and, with the exception of some time spent in coastal northern California, he has lived in Orange County all his life. He teaches composition and creative writing at Chapman University; in fact, he has been a writing teacher since 1976, about the same time that he sold his first short story, "Red Planet," to Unearth magazine. He has written fourteen novels as well as dozens of short stories, essays, and articles. Among his recent novels are Night Relics, an atmospheric ghost story set in the Santa Ana Mountains and the city of Orange; The Paper Grail, a foggy and fantastic romance set along the Mendocino coast in northern California; All the Bells on Earth, a Faustian mystery that transpires in the old neighborhoods of downtown Orange during a rainy and unusual Christmas season; and Winter Tides, a ghost-and-murer mystery set in Huntington Beach. His latest novel, The Rainy Season,was published in August of 1999. Blaylock is a two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, most recently for his short story "Thirteen Phantasms." His story "Unidentified Objects" was included in Prize Stories 1990: The O. Henry Awards. His first collection of short fiction was published by Edgewood Press in the summer of 2001.About the Editor As fiction editor of Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, Ellen Datlow earned a reputation for encouraging and developing an entire generation of fiction writers, and has published some of today's biggest names in the SF, fantasy and horror genres. The stunning a.s.sortment of writers Datlow brought to the pages of Omni includes such talents as William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Dan Simmons, K.W.

Jeter, Clive Barker, Stephen King, William Burroughs, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Carroll, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub and Jack Cady, among many others.

She was then the editor of Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, a Webzine founded in September 1998 that remained active until December 1999. During that period, Event Horizon published "The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link, winner of the 1999 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story - only the second story published on the Internet to win the World Fantasy Award. (The first, "Radio Waves" by Michael Swanwick, was published by Datlow in Omni Online).

Datlow is currently tied for winning the most World Fantasy Awards in the organization's history (six); has won, with co-editor Terri Windling, a Bram Stoker Award for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror #13, and has received multiple Hugo Award nominations for Best Editor.