Neil Gaiman - Shadows over Baker Street

He’s won the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, most of the comics awards, and lots of other literary awards from all over the world, and still remains humble, lovable, modest, and shy. He is currently saving up for a small tropical island with a hidden shark pool and the kind of giant laser death beam that can be concentrated on any of the major cities of the world. Not for any particular reason.

Barbara Hambly, at various times in her life, has been a high-school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of one high-school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading The Wizard of Oz at an early age, and it has continued ever since. She attended the university of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master’s degree in the subject. While there, she also became involved in karate, making black belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournments. She now lives in Los Angeles.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the Irish-born author of two award-winning novels, Silk and Threshold , and her short fiction has been collected in Candles for Elizabeth , Tales of Pain and Wonder , Wrong Things (with Poppy Z. Brite), and From Weird and Distant Shores . She has recently completed her third novel, Low Red Moon . Ms. Kiernan lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and is seriously considering giving up writing for a career as a freelance paranormal investigator.

Tim Lebbon’s books include Mesmer , Faith in the Flesh , Hush (with Gavin Williams), As the Sun Goes Down , Face , The Nature of Balance , Until She Sleeps , and the novella collection White and Other Tales of Ruin . His novellas White and Naming of Parts both won British Fantasy Awards for Best Short Fiction, and his short story “Reconstructing Amy” recently won the Bram Stoker Award. He has been published in many magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror , Dark Terrors 6 , Keep Out the Night , Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror , The Darker Side , Cemetery Dance , October Dreams , The Children of Cthulhu , and Phantoms of Venice .

Future books include Dusk and Dawn , a fantasy duology from Night Shade Books; Into the Wild Green Yonder, a collaboration with Peter Crowther due soon from Cemetery Dance Publications; a new novella from PS Publishing, Changing of Faces; and a novella collaboration with Simon Clark for Earthling Publications.

James Lowder has worked extensively in fantasy and horror publishing on both sides of the editorial blotter. He’s authored several best-selling fantasy and dark fantasy novels, including Prince of Lies and Knight of the Black Rose ; short fiction for such diverse anthologies as Historical Hauntings , Truth Until Paradox , and Realms of Mystery ; and a large number of film and book reviews; feature articles; and even the occasional comic-book script. His credits as anthologist include Realms of Valor , The Doom of Camelot , and The Book of All Flesh . He also serves as executive editor for Green Knight Publishing’s line of Arthurian fiction.

Richard A. Lupoff says, “I was introduced to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes as a small child when my older brother, under strong protest, took me to see the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce version of The Hound of the Baskervilles . I discovered H. P. Lovecraft on my own when I came across ‘The Dunwich Horror’ in a paperback anthology when I was eleven.

“Both authors have influenced my own work. My Holmesian tales include ‘The Adventure of the Boulevard Assassin’ and ‘The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier.’ I’ve actually done more Lovecraft-inspired stories, among them ‘The Doom That Came to Dunwich,’ ‘Facts in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley,’ and ‘Simeon Dimsby’s Workshop,’ which will be collected in a volume called Tentacular Tales , forthcoming from Fedogan & Bremer.

“These and other pastiches represent only a portion of my work, which includes many science fiction and mystery novels, more than one hundred short stories, film scripts, journalism, criticism, and The Great American Paperback , an award-winning illustrated history of mass-market publishing.”

F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre spent his formative years in Australia but now lives in New York City and in Minffordd, North Wales. He is the author of the Victorian horror novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994) and author/illustrator of the humor anthology MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary (2001). His science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories have been published in Weird Tales , Analog , Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine , Absolute Magnitude , and many anthologies. He is also an illustrator for Analog . Mr. MacIntyre has written one previous Sherlock Holmes story, in which Holmes and Watson cross paths with Aleister Crowley and Ambrose Bierce: “The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex” (published in New Sherlock Holmes Adventures , 1997).

Steve Perry has sold dozens of stories to magazines and anthologies and written a considerable number of novels, animated teleplays, nonfiction articles, reviews, and essays, along with a couple of unproduced movie scripts. He wrote for Batman: The Animated Series during its first Emmy Award–winning season, and during the second season, one of his scripts was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing—which no doubt caused the subsequent loss of that award. His novelization of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire spent ten weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. He also did the bestselling novelization for the summer blockbuster movie Men in Black , and all of his collaborative novels for Tom Clancy’s Net Force series (seven of them so far) have made the Times list. His Matador series of science fiction novels has been called a cult classic. For the past several years he has concentrated on books, and is currently working on his fiftieth novel.

Brian Stableford’s final installment of his six-volume “future history” series from Tor, The Omega Expedition, was published in December 2002. Other recent publications include The Eleventh Hour (Cosmos, 2001), The Gateway of Eternity (Cosmos, 2002), and Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First Century Ghost Story (Prime, 2003). The Curse of the Coral Bride, the first novel in a projected six-book series of farfuturistic fantasies, will hopefully appear in 2003, but is uncontracted at the time of writing. Brian is currently employed as a 0.25 lecturer in creative writing at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, teaching an M.A. course in Writing for Children.

John P. Vourlis is one of the few people who can say that writing isn’t rocket science and actually know what he’s talking about. That’s because John was a rocket scientist, working in Space Propulsion Technology at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. He’s also launched his own interactive multimedia software company and now helms an Academy Award–winning special-effects lighting company in Hollywood. John would like to thank Steve Altman, Patrick Merla, and Michael Reaves for their tireless encouragement on this story, and offer highest praise to Mr. Doyle and Mr. Lovecraft for providing important clues, and vital inspiration, in the quest to solve his own mysterious case of insomnia. John is currently cowriting a novel, Timespanners, with graphic artist Jaime Lombardo.