And now it’s your turn to start making history …
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank the following people for their talent and assistance: our UK editor, Nic Cheetham, at Head of Zeus and our U.S. editor, Liz Gorinsky, at Tor as well as our agents, Sally Harding and Ron Eckel, and all the good folks at the Cooke Agency for making this adventure come to pass. Thanks also to Dan Read, a good friend and bookseller extraordinaire, for finding and sharing obscure books with us and to Paula Guran, for her much appreciated friendship. Many thanks to the remarkable Michael Moorcock for his continued support and for also pointing us in more than one right direction, to the tireless Theresa Goulding who is always there to lend a hand and a smile, to Richard Scott for helping us track down a couple of stories; to Fritz Foy for help finding our way through the permissions maze; to Edward Gauvin for his expertise and translation talents; and to those editors who helped us along the way, including John Joseph Adams, Jetse de Vries, Gavin Grant, Alisa Krasnostein, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Bill Schafer, and Jonathan Strahan. We’d also like to thank Tyler Owen and the good people over at the Fermentation Lounge. Sustenance for both the brain and body! And last but not least, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our editorial assistants, Dominik Parisien and Tessa Kum, for embarking on this adventure with us and keeping us sane. We couldn’t have done it without you.
About the Editors & Nonfiction Contributors
For twenty-five years, Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer have been traveling into the past to bring back incredible stories for generations of readers. Their recent The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories (Atlantic Books, UK) covered 100 years of weird fiction in a single massive 750,000-word, 1,200-page volume. The VanderMeers have also edited such iconic compilations as Steampunk and The New Weird, both considered definitive for those subgenres. Other recent books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. This “literary power couple” (Boing Boing) has been profiled on national NPR, the Weather Channel, Wired.com, and the New York Times’s book blog. Together or separately, they have been keynote speakers around the world, including at MIT, the Library of Congress, and Utopiales. They also have been brought in to conduct creativity workshops for the likes of Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) and help run Wofford College’s Shared Worlds, a unique SF/Fantasy teen writing camp. Ann served as editor in chief of Weird Tales for five years and currently serves as a consulting editor for Tor.com. She also recently edited Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution. Jeff’s recent Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction is the world’s first image-driven writing book. His forthcoming Southern Reach trilogy was optioned by Paramount Pictures through Scott Rudin Productions and will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (U.S.), HarperCollins Canada, and Fourth Estate (UK). The VanderMeers live in Tallahassee, Florida, with four cats and twenty thousand books.
Jason Heller is the author of the alternate history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Hugo-nominated editor for his work at Clarkesworld magazine. He’s also a contributing writer and former editor for The Onion’s A.V. Club. In addition, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Weird Tales, Alternative Press, Tor.com, and others. He lives in Denver, where he plays in punk bands and subjects his writing students to merciless doses of Bob Dylan.
Rian Johnson is an award-winning writer and director whose films include Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and the time-travel movie Looper. He lives in Los Angeles.
Tessa Kum’s work has appeared in Halo: Evolutions, Baggage, Daikaiju, ASIM, and other places. A Clarion South 2005 graduate, she was an editorial assistant at Weird Tales while under the command of Ann VanderMeer and is now a freelance editor. She lives in Melbourne.
Stan Love is a planetary scientist, NASA astronaut, and lifelong science fiction fan. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College, where they use rhinoceroses to teach relativity, and a master’s and doctorate in astronomy from the University of Washington. He gives frequent public presentations on space science and exploration based on his professional background and his experience as a Space Shuttle crewmember. Dr. Love admires the interplay between speculative fiction, which can imagine better futures, and science and technology, which can make them real.
Dominik Parisien is a Franco-Ontarian living in Montreal, Quebec. He holds an MA in English literature from the University of Ottawa. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling, Mythic Delirium, Ideomancer, Shock Totem, Strange Horizons, and Tesseracts Seventeen, amongst others. Dominik provides editorial support to Cheeky Frawg Books and is a former editorial assistant for Weird Tales.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award; her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, and others, and anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Weird Tales, and Tor.com, and she’s a coauthor of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk).
Charles Yu received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his short-story collection, Third Class Superhero. His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was a New York Times Notable Book and named by Time magazine as one of the Best Books of 2010. His latest book is Sorry Please Thank You, which was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Santa Monica.
EXTENDED COPYRIGHT
Unless otherwise stated the following were reprinted by permission of the authors.
Douglas Adams: ‘Young Zaphod Plays It Safe’, © 2003 by Douglas Adams. Originally published in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986), The Salmon of Doubt (2002). Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and Macmillan Publishers.
Dean Francis Alfar: ‘Terminós’, copyright © 2005 by Dean Francis Alfar. Originally published in Rabid Transit: Menagerie, edited by Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, and Kristin Livdahl, Velocity Press, 2005.