Epitaph on Julian Prince’s gravestone
“Finally home.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to the following:
My Publisher/Editor: Steve Saffel, for acquiring and editing the book, and to the rest of the team that worked on the book at Titan Books.
My Agents (past and present): Joe Monti (former) and Seth Fishman (present) for being awesome and supportive.
My Mentor: Gordon Van Gelder, for being a mentor and a friend.
My Colleague: Ellen Datlow for revealing the mysteries of anthologizing.
My Family: my amazing wife, Christie; my mom, Marianne, and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support.
Author/Contract Wranglers: Marie Florio, Ty Franck, Patricia Rogers, Laura Bradford, Kathleen Bellamy, Gavin Grant, and Duvall Osteen.
Second Opinion Corps: Robyn Lupo, Caleb Jordan Schulz, Andrew Liptak, Benjamin Blattberg, Kristin Centorcelli, Lashawn Wanak, Lisa Rogers, Louise Kane, Paul DesCombaz, Robert Barton Bland, Stephanie M. Loree, Theresa Glover, and Patrick Stephens for providing feedback on the stories during the editorial process.
Intern: Extra special thanks to my former intern, Amber Barkley, who not only provided feedback on stories, but also helped out a lot with other behind-the-scenes stuff on this anthology.
My Writers: Everyone who appears in this anthology.
My Readers (last but not least): Everyone who bought this book, or any of my other anthologies, and who make doing books like this possible.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Ann Aguirre is a New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author with a degree in English Literature; before she began writing full-time, she was a clown, a clerk, a voice actress, and a savior of stray kittens, not necessarily in that order. She grew up in a yellow house across from a cornfield, but now she lives in sunny Mexico with her husband, children, and various pets. She likes books, emo music, and action movies. She writes all kinds of genre fiction for adults and teens.
Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, and the inaugural issue of the horror magazine Aghast, among other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.
Paolo Bacigalupi is the bestselling author of the novels The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and the collection Pump Six and Other Stories. He is a winner of the Michael L. Printz, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and was a National Book Award finalist. A new novel for young adults, The Doubt Factory, came out in 2014, and a new science fiction novel, The Water Knife, is due out in May 2015.
Christopher Barzak is the author of the Crawford Fantasy Award winning novel, One for Sorrow, which has been made into the recently released Sundance feature film Jamie Marks is Dead. His second novel, The Love We Share Without Knowing, was a finalist for the Nebula and Tiptree Awards. He is also the author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, a collection of surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, a collection of supernatural fantasies, which won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. He grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a southern California beach town, the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside of Tokyo, Japan, where he lived for two years. His next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, will be published by Knopf in Fall 2015. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.
Lauren Beukes (laurenbeukes.com) is a South African novelist, TV scriptwriter, documentary maker, comics writer, and occasional journalist. She is the author of the novels Moxyland, Zoo City (winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Shining Girls, and Broken Monsters. She’s also written rollicking nonfiction about maverick South African women, TV scripts, and comics for Vertigo. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Armored, Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse, and The Apex Book of World SF.
David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international bestselling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
Orson Scott Card is the bestselling author of more than forty novels, including Ender’s Game, which was a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. The sequel, Speaker for the Dead, also won both awards, making Card the only author to have captured science fiction’s two most coveted prizes in consecutive years. His most recent books include book three of his Pathfinders trilogy, Visitors; three books in the Formic War series co-authored with Aaron Johnston, Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Earth Awakens; an Ender’s Shadow novel, Shadows in Flight; and book two of the Mither Mages series, The Gate Thief.
Junot Díaz is the author of the bestselling novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the books Drown and This is How You Lose Her. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker many times, and also in Glimmer Train and African Voices. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Books Critic Circle Award and most recently the MacArthur Fellowship. The fiction editor at The Boston Review and the co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Workshop, Díaz teaches writing at MIT.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and novels for adults like The Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.
Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers’ Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.