Lewis Shiner was born in 1950 and played in rock bands from high school on. Previous novels include Black & White, the award-winning Glimpses, and the cyberpunk classic Frontera. He's written about music for the Village Voice, Pulse, Crawdaddy, and others. His short fiction has been reprinted in a number of best-of-the-year anthologies, and his latest collection is Heroes and Villains: Three Short Novels and a Fable. He lives in North Carolina.

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and The Feral Detective. Motherless Brooklyn was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy, 2312, Aurora and New York 2140. In 2008 he was named a 'Hero of the Environment' by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada research institute. He lives in Davis, California.

Paul Tremblay is a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland.

He has served as the president of the board of directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and numerous year's best anthologies.

He has a master's degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his wife and two children.

Pat Cadigan (1953 -)Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, NY, and grew up in Fitchburg, MA. Attending the University of Massachusetts on a scholarship, she eventually transferred to the University of Kansas where she received her degree.

Since embarking on her career as a fiction writer in 1987, her Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated short stories have appeared in such magazines as Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine as well as numerous anthologies.

Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured the Locus Award in 1990, and she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools. Pat Cadigan moved to the UK in 1996 and now lives in London.

Gwyneth Jones lives in Brighton with her husband and son. She won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for BOLD AS LOVE; CASTLES MADE OF SAND was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award.

She is the previous winner of the James Tiptree Memorial Award and two World Fantasy Awards; four of her previous books have been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award

Greg Bear is one of the world's leading hard SF authors. A multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, he sold his first short story, at the age of fifteen, to Robert Lowndes's Famous Science Fiction.

His novels Blood Music and Eon are both Gollancz Masterworks. A full-time writer, he lives in Washington with his family.

John Shirley was born in Houston and now lives in Vancouver, Washington. He is the author of numerous novels and books of short stories, and won the Bram Stoker Award for his collection Black Butterflies. His novels include the Specialist books (under the name John Cutter), The Brigade, Bleak History, the A Song Called Youth trilogy, and a novel of Wyatt Earp as a young lawman, Wyatt in Wichita. He has also written television, movies, and songs.

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.