Dr John Chu is Senior National Curator, Midlands (Pictures and Sculpture) at the National Trust. He specialises in 18th-century British and French painting and has published and lectured widely on the art of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. He previously worked at Tate on the Turner Bequest and has taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Reading.

Daryl Gregory grew up in Chicago and has lived in various other cities within a few miles of the continent-spanning highway, Interstate 80, including his current home, Oakland, California.

He's been a high school teacher, a technical writer, and a programmer, and now writes full time, occasionally dabbling in comics and videogame scripts.

His short novel We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson award, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards.

The novel Afterparty was a National Public Radio and Kirkus Best Fiction book of the year. Spoonbenders is his first work of literary fiction.

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor and author of both fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for Popular Science, Wired and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

She co-founded the science fiction website io9 and served as editor-in-chief from 2008-2015, and subsequently edited Gizmodo. As of 2016, she is tech culture editor at the technology site Ars Technica.

Jonathan Strahan has co-edited The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies for HarperCollins Australia, co-edits the Science Fiction: The Best of...and Fantasy: The Best of...anthology series with Karen Haber for Simon & Schuster/ibooks, edits the Best Short Novels anthology series for the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, and co-edited The Locus Awards for Eos with Charles N. Brown. He is also the Reviews Editor for Locus: The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Fields, and reviews for the magazine regularly. He is currently working on The New Space Opera II.