About the Editors
Hugo Award–winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award–winner Jeff VanderMeer have recently coedited such anthologies as Best American Fantasy #1 & 2, Steampunk, Steampunk Reloaded, The New Weird, Last Drink Bird Head, and Fast Ships, Black Sails. They are the coauthors of The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. Future projects include The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Fictions, for Atlantic. Jeff’s latest books are the novel Finch, a World Fantasy Award and Nebula Award finalist; the story collection The Third Bear; the nonfiction collection Monstrous Creatures; the coffee-table book The Steampunk Bible (with S. J. Chambers); and the writing strategy guide Booklife. Ann is the editor in chief of Weird Tales magazine and has a regular art column on the popular SF/fantasy Web site io9. Together, they have been profiled by National Public Radio and the New York Times’ Papercuts blog. They are active teachers, and have taught at Clarion San Diego, Odyssey, and the teen writing camp Shared Worlds, for which Jeff serves as the assistant director. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with too many books and four cats. For more information, visit jeffvandermeer.com.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, a huge thank-you to Diana Gill, our editor, for being wonderfully supportive of this project and letting this three-ring circus reach its full potential. Thanks also to Will Hinton at Harper Voyager, who put up with a constant stream of e-mails and image downloads, among other impositions—as well as everyone else involved in this project, including the book designer. Huge thanks as well to John Coulthart for acting as an image consultant to this anthology, while also providing his own art/design and found art—you’re the best and we couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to the gang at Brueggers, Hopkins, and Monks for good company, and for keeping us fed and caffeinated during the process. Thanks to our friends at the Leon Station post office for laughs and over twenty years of great service. We would also like to thank Myra Miller and Arthur Burns at Alpha Data Systems for continuing support (and a special shoutout to Arthur for keeping all our technology running smoothly).
We’re also indebted to Stepan Chapman and Michael Cisco’s contributions to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, as this volume makes use of some of their ideas and writings from that prior volume. We’re also forever indebted to our New Weird editor in the Czech Republic, Martin Šust, for his help in acquiring art from Jan Svankmajer. Finally, thanks to all of the contributors for making this anthology so special for us.
Credits
ARTISTS
All images copyright 2011 to the individual creators and original to this anthology, unless otherwise noted. All public-domain art and photography provided by and/or Photoshopped by John Coulthart. All title pages copyright 2011 John Coulthart.