ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MADELINE ASHBY is a science fiction writer, futurist, speaker, and immigrant living in Toronto. A graduate of OCAD University’s Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation program, she has worked with Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and other organizations. Ashby is the author of Company Town and the Machine Dynasty series. For two years she wrote a regular column for the Ottawa Citizen, and her short fiction has appeared in Nature, Flurb, Tesseracts, Imaginarium, and Escape Pod. Her essays and criticism have appeared at Boing Boing, io9, Worldchanging, The Creators Project, Arcfinity, , MISC Magazine, and Future Now.
DELILAH S. DAWSON is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma, the Ladycastle comic, the Blud series, the Hit series, Servants of the Storm, Star Wars: The Perfect Weapon, and Scorched, as well as Wake of Vultures and the Shadow series, written as Lila Bowen. The story in this anthology, “Ostentation of Peacocks,” takes place between Wake of Vultures and Conspiracy of Ravens. With Kevin Hearne she is the cowriter of the Tales of Pell series, which begins in 2018 with Kill the Farmboy. Find her online at .
JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Shadow Year, The Girl in the Glass, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Cosmology of the Wider World, and the short story collections The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He is the author of 150 short stories that have appeared in numerous venues from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. He lives in Ohio and teaches part time at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Hugo and Campbell Award finalist SARAH GAILEY is an internationally published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her nonfiction has been published by Mashable and the Boston Globe, and she is a regular contributor for and Barnes & Noble. Her most recent fiction credits include Mothership Zeta, Fireside Fiction, and the Speculative Bookshop Anthology. Her debut novella, River of Teeth, came out in May 2017. She has a novel forthcoming from Tor Books in Spring 2019. Gailey lives in beautiful Oakland, California, with her husband and two scrappy dogs. You can find links to her work at ; find her on social media .
MAX GLADSTONE has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and nominated for the Hugo Award. Tor Books published Four Roads Cross, the fifth novel in Max’s Craft Sequence (preceded by Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, Full Fathom Five, and Last First Snow) in July 2016. Max’s game Choice of the Deathless was nominated for a XYZZY Award, and Full Fathom Five was nominated for the Lambda Award. His short fiction has appeared on , in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, and in Uncanny magazine. His most recent project is the globetrotting urban fantasy serial Bookburners, available in eBook and audio from Serial Box, and in print from Saga Press.
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and editor, most recently of the novels Magonia, Aerie, Queen of Kings, and the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is coeditor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been included in many year’s best anthologies, including Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams, and have been finalists for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards. Find her at on Twitter, or .
JIM C. HINES’S first novel was Goblin Quest, the humorous tale of a nearsighted goblin runt and his pet fire-spider. Actor and author Wil Wheaton described the book as “too f***ing cool for words,” which is pretty much the Best Blurb Ever. After finishing the goblin trilogy, Jim went on to write the Princess series of fairy tale retellings and the Magic ex Libris books, a modern-day fantasy series about a magic-wielding librarian, a dryad, a secret society founded by Johannes Gutenberg, a flaming spider, and an enchanted convertible. He’s also the author of the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. His most recent novel is Terminal Alliance, book one of the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. His short fiction has appeared in more than fifty magazines and anthologies. Jim is an active blogger about topics ranging from sexism and harassment to zombie-themed Christmas carols, and won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2012. He lives with his wife and two children in mid-Michigan. You can find him at or on Twitter as .
KAT HOWARD is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and horror who lives and writes in New Hampshire. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, performed on NPR, and anthologized in year’s best and best-of volumes. In the past, she’s been a competitive fencer and a college professor. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, was released in May 2016 and was followed by An Unkindness of Magicians in September 2017. These will be followed by a short fiction collection in 2018, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, all from Saga Press.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL is the author of the Glamourist Histories series of fantasy novels. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, and the RT Reviews Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several year’s best anthologies. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), recording fiction for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Rob, and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit .
KEN LIU is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms, as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. In addition to his original fiction, Ken is also the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated Death’s End, the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series Remembrance of Earth’s Past, and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times bestselling and five-time Bram Stoker Award–winning suspense author, editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator, and writing teacher/lecturer. He was named one of Today’s Top Ten Horror Writers by . His books have been sold to more than two dozen countries.
SEANAN MCGUIRE is the Hugo, Campbell, Alex, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning author of more than twenty-five books, both under her own name and the name Mira Grant, beginning with 2009’s Rosemary and Rue. Seanan shares her home with two enormous blue Maine Coon cats, a terrifying number of books, and a steadily growing collection of creepy dolls. Really, all she’s missing to be a horror movie is her own private corn maze. When not writing, she records albums of original science fiction folk music (called “filk”), travels, and continues in her efforts to visit every single Disney Park in the world. It’s a relatively harmless hobby, so we let her have it. You can keep up with Seanan at , or on Twitter as .
ANNALEE NEWITZ divides her time between science fiction and science fact. The founding editor of io9, she is currently the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. She’s the author, most recently, of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (nonfiction) and Autonomous (fiction). She lives in California with several life forms, all of whom she loves.
TIM PRATT is the author of many short stories and over twenty novels, including The Deep Woods and Heirs of Grace. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and other nice places. He’s a Hugo Award winner and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He lives in Berkeley, California, and works as a senior editor at Locus, a trade magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy publishing. He tweets a lot as , and his website is . He publishes a new short story every month for his Patreon supporters at .
JOHN SCALZI is a confirmed biological human who writes.
LAVIE TIDHAR is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winner and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming, the World Fantasy Award winner Osama, and of the critically acclaimed and Seiun Award nominated The Violent Century. His latest novel is the Campbell Award winner and Locus and Clarke Award nominee Central Station. He is the author of many other novels, novellas, and short stories.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human. Find her on Twitter at .
ALYSSA WONG lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and really, really likes crows. Her fiction has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Locus Awards, and she was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, and her work has been published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare magazine, Black Static, and , among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as .