Robert Leroy Ripley was an American cartoonist who created and developed the world-famous Ripley's Believe It or Not! cartoon strip in the years after the First World War.

He travelled the globe in search of unusual objects and stories, and built up an extraordinary collection of everything from shrunken heads to dinosaur eggs and iron maidens. These are now exhibited in Ripley museums around the world.

The Ripley's Believe It or Not! is an annual international top-ten bestseller.

Charlie Brooker is an award-winning writer, producer and broadcaster whose career has spanned television, radio, print, and online media.

Brooker is the creator and writer of Black Mirror, whose fourth season launched on Netflix at the end of 2017 and won a BAFTA Craft Award and has recently picked up three BAFTA TV Awards nominations. The critically acclaimed, mind-bending anthology series originally launched on Channel 4 in 2011 and over its four seasons has collected awards including Primetime Emmys® for Outstanding TV Movie and Outstanding Writing for a TV Movie, Producers Guild of America, Rose D'or, BAFTA, International Emmy® and Peabody.

Charlie has presented numerous television shows including three series of his BBC Two satirical review show Weekly Wipe, the third series of which was nominated for the 2015 BAFTA for Best Comedy and Comedy Entertainment Programme, and the annual shindig Charlie Brooker’s End of Year Wipe, which won a BAFTA for its 2016 edition. Also, Charlie previously presented the BAFTA-nominated Election Wipe, Gameswipe and Newswipe, which won the 2009 Royal Television Society Award for Best Entertainment Programme and the How TV Ruined Your Life series for BBC TWO. He has also presented You Have Been Watching and 10 O'Clock Live for Channel 4, which he was also BAFTA-nominated for in 2014.

Charlie is also behind the BBC Two series Cunk on Britain and the BAFTA-nominated Cunk on Shakespeare with regular Weekly Wipe contributor Philomena Cunk.

He also co-wrote the critically acclaimed detective spoof A Touch of Cloth for Sky One. The TV film trilogy starred John Hannah and Suranne Jones and won the Broadcast Award for Best Comedy and was nominated for the RTS Award for Best Comedy.

In 2008 Brooker wrote the five-part thriller Dead Set, which starred Jaime Winstone and Riz Ahmed and was nominated for a Best Drama Serial BAFTA; and co-wrote with Chris Morris the six-part comedy series Nathan Barley for Channel 4.

Claire North is a pseudonym for Catherine Webb, a Carnegie Medal-nominated author whose debut novel was written when she was just fourteen years old.

She is fast establishing herself as one of the most powerful and imaginative voices in modern fiction. Her first book published under the Claire North pen name was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which became a word-of-mouth bestseller and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The follow-up Touch received widespread critical acclaim and was described by the Independent as 'little short of a masterpiece'. Her next novel The Sudden Appearance of Hope won the 2017 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and her recent book The End of the Day has been shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. She lives in London.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, and contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, Wired, and many others.

He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. New York Times bestseller Little Brother was published in 2008.

Sylvain Neuvel was born in Quebec and dropped out of school when he was fifteen. Since then he has sold ice cream in California, peddled furniture across Canada, and taught Linguistics in India.

He has also worked as a software engineer, journalist, certified translator and received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago.

He is an amateur robotics enthusiast and life-long fan of all things science fiction. Sleeping Giants, his debut novel and first in the Themis Files series, was published in 2016. Waking Gods is his second novel.