John Adams - Wastelands 2

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 Brinis 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 Cardis 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 Díazis 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 Dueis 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.

Nashville native Toiya Kristen Finleyis a writer, editor, game designer, and narrative designer/game writer. Her fiction has been published in Nature , Fantasy Magazine , Daily Science Fiction , The Best of Electric Velocipede , and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2010 . She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate and a co-founder and instructor at GDC Online’s Game Writing Tutorial. Her work in games includes Academagia: The Making of Mages and its DLC, Fat Chicken , and a list of unannounced/suspended-production social-network RPGs and mobile games whose existence shall remain forever a secret (hey, that’s the game industry for ya). The Game Narrative Toolbox (Focal Press), a book on narrative design she’s co-authoring with Jennifer Brandes Hepler, Ann Lemay, and Tobias Heussner, will be out in early 2015.

Milo James Fowler( milojamesfowler.com) is a teacher by day and a speculative fictioneer by night. When he’s not grading papers, he’s imagining what the world might be like in a dozen alternate realities. He is an active SFWA member, and his work has appeared in more than 90 publications, including AE SciFi , Cosmos , Daily Science Fiction , Nature , and Shimmer . His novel Captain Bartholomew Quasar and the Space-Time Displacement Conundrum is now available from Every Day Publishing, and his other stories can be found wherever e-books are sold.

Maria Dahvana Headleyis the author of the upcoming young adult skyship novel Magonia from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings , the memoir The Year of Yes , and co-author with Kat Howard of the short horror novella The End of the Sentence . With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times -bestselling co-editor of the monster anthology Unnatural Creatures , benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson award-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed (“Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream,” “The Traditional”), on Tor.com, The Toast, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, Uncanny Magazine, Glitter & Mayhem and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead , as well as in a number of Year’s Bests, most recently Year’s Best Weird. She lives in Brooklyn with a collection of beasts, an anvil, and a speakeasy bar through the cellar doors. Find her on Twitter @MARIADAHVANAor on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com.

Hugh Howeyis the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel Wool , which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the Wool omnibus is frequently the #1 bestselling book on Amazon.comand is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott, and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. The story of Wool ’s meteoric success has been reported in major media outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, Variety , the Washington Post , the Wall Street Journal , Deadline Hollywood , and elsewhere. Howey lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife Amber and his dog Bella.

Keffy R. M. Kehrliis a science fiction and fantasy writer currently living in Seattle. Although his degrees are in physics and linguistics, he spends most of his time in a basement performing molecular biology experiments for fun and profit. In 2008, he attended Clarion UCSD where he learned that, unfortunately, rattlesnakes don’t always rattle. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine , Lightspeed , and Three-Lobed Burning Eye.

Jake Kerr:After fifteen years as a music industry journalist Jake Kerr’s first published story, “The Old Equations,” was nominated for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. His stories have subsequently been published in magazines across the world, broadcast in multiple podcasts, and been published in multiple anthologies and year’s best collections. His young adult novel, Tommy Black and the Coat of Invincibility , was released in January 2015. The third and final volume in the series will be released later in the year. A graduate of Kenyon College, Kerr studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegría. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.