Elly Bangs was born in Seattle and lived there nearly her whole life. She earned a BA in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, roughly sixty miles away. She’s primarily worked in small nonprofit organizations, “usually in a role that combines doing all their paperwork with building their websites and databases. Right now I’m […]

Becky Chambers grew up outside Los Angeles “in a family heavily involved in space science”—her father worked in aerospace engineering, her mother worked as an astrobiology educator. Her mother loved genre fiction, so Chambers was reading and watching SFF shows before she’d started school. Despite the prevalence of the sciences in her family, she moved […]

As a self-avowed Star Trek nerd, it is perhaps fitting that Karen Osborne’s earliest attempts at selling fiction were in the Star Trek franchise: “As a teen, I once wrote a Star Trek: Voyager spec script with a friend over CompuServe, which became my first real rejection letter. It’s framed.” Osborne’s first SFF sales of […]

Born in Pondicherry, India, S.B. Divya moved to the US when she was five. She graduated high school in Minnesota, then did her undergrad at Caltech. Divya dabbled in one creative writing class during her sophomore year, but ultimately went for her computational neuroscience degree. She later earned a master’s in signal processing from UC […]

If you Google “author with most Hugo awards” the answer Google pushes on you is that Robert A. Heinlein won four Hugo awards in his lifetime for Best Novel. Not counting retroactive awards, his last win was in 1967. If you squint you will see another result: Lois McMaster Bujold, four wins for Best Novel […]

In 2011 Clarkesworld published E. Lily Yu's short story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” which was a finalist for the Dell Award. The genre community also took notice: the story earned her nominations for a Million Writers Award, a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a Locus Award. In […]

When Stina Leicht was small, she wanted to grow up to be like Vincent Price—or so her website says. Instead, she grew up to be a writer who has impressed fans and critics alike. Stina Leicht (“Pronounced ‘Steena.’ Think of it as Tina with an extra-added S. My last name is pronounced ‘Lite,’ like the […]

Long before winning a Hugo and a Rhysling, Tim Pratt worked as an advertising copywriter (briefly), and as a tech writer and office manager for a disability advocacy company. In 2001 he moved to Oakland, CA and landed a job as editorial assistant at Locus Magazine. Born in Goldsboro, NC, as a child Pratt traveled […]

Many only know him by the shortened name on the spine: Flesk, next to the logo resembling leaves or fire—at least to me. But John Fleskes has been putting out high quality art books for nearly twenty years. Flesk Publications showcases fantastic art by a range of artists, many of them with an array of […]

Rebecca Kuang is one of those rare individuals who hit a home run right out of the gate. She wrote a book for herself as an experiment and it became a big hit. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar and a Chinese-English translator. She earned an MPhil in Chinese studies from Cambridge and an MSc in […]

Well known for his award-winning trilogy about terraforming Mars with Red Mars in 1992, Green Mars in 1993, and Blue Mars in 1996, Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, came out in 1984. The Wild Shore was the first book for his Orange County trilogy as well as the first title in Ace […]

Before you ever heard of her, Rebecca Roanhorse was already on her way to glory. In 2018, she showed up in Pittsburgh for the Annual Nebula Awards Conference, nominated for her first publication: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” (Apex Magazine 8/17). In front of a crowd of professional authors and publishers, almost all of […]

Born in Springfield, MA, Sheila Williams grew up in a family of five in western Massachusetts. Her mother had a master’s degree in microbiology; her father sparked her interest in genre fiction, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs to her. He had a membership to the Science Fiction Book Club, which delivered books every month. Once the […]

Scott H. Andrews has over a dozen electric guitars, half of which he built himself, including one he started building in 2007. But then he launched Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2008. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (BCS) is a nonprofit, SFWA-qualifying online magazine dedicated to publishing “literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, […]

Writing fiction ranging from light fantasy to hard SF, Michael Swanwick has been earning award nominations since his 1980 novelettes landed on Locus lists and Nebula Awards ballots: “The Feast of Saint Janis” and “Ginungagap.” “Mummer Kiss” earned him his first win, an SF Chronicle Award in the Novelette category. Since then he’s received more […]

International bestselling author Lauren Beukes grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. She attended Roedean School in Johannesburg, earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town, and spent a decade as a freelance journalist working in South Africa and the US, covering electricity cable thieves, HIV+ beauty pageants, metro cops, and homeless […]

If you search the Tor.com site for Madeline Ashby, you will find this entry: “Hi. My name is Madeline Ashby, and I write the Cowboy Bebop rewatch posts.” Dig deeper and you’ll find an individual who is passionate about a great many things: anime, novels, film, and the future among them. Born in Panorama City, […]

Kate Elliott has far more books out than you probably know. Née Alis A. Rasmussen, she was born in Des Moines, IA, studied at University College of North Wales—Bangor and at Mills College in Oakland, CA, earning a BA in English. Her debut novel, The Labyrinth Gate, was published in 1988. In 1990, came the […]

John P. Murphy attended Viable Paradise in 2010 and started selling fiction shortly after. His first publications came out in 2011: several pieces in The Drabblecast and “The Body and the Bomb” in Crossed Genres. “Tumbleweeds and Indelicate Questions” was his first pro sale, published in Nature. After a few novella and short story sales, […]

Taiyo Fujii, Japanese science fiction author of Gene Mapper and Orbital Cloud, invited me here. I only met him half a year earlier, at Worldcon in Dublin, but we quickly became friends and our plans took shape a few months later during dinner in Tokyo. The place is Lyon and the occasion is the AI […]

Lois McMaster Bujold has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel a record-tying four times: The Vor Game in 1991; Barrayar in 1992, which also won a Locus Award; Mirror Dance in 1995, which, again, also won a Locus Award; and Paladin of Souls in 2004, which also won a Nebula Award and a Locus […]

Tamsyn Muir landed on many readers’ radars with the release of full-length novel Gideon the Ninth, published by Tor.com publications in September 2019. Beyond blurbs and promises of something utterly unique, readers showed appreciation through Goodreads Choice nominations in two categories, as well as nominations and short listing for an array of other awards such […]

Martha Wells grew up in Texas reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, getting books at her local library. In her teens, she was writing Star Wars and Godzilla fanfic, complete with maps of Monster Island. She received a BA in anthropology at Texas A&M but took other classes as well, including a […]

Raised on a kibbutz in Israel, Lavie Tidhar began his world travels at fifteen, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and Vanuatu. At twenty-two he published a collection of poetry, and he had his first fiction stories published at twenty-seven. In 2009, the first volume of The Apex Book of World SF came out, […]

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales. He earned degrees in astronomy from the Newcastle University in England and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He began writing science fiction in his teens, and had his first publication in Interzone in 1990: “Nunivak Snowflakes.” In 1991 he moved to the […]

Born in Battle Ground WA, Kameron Hurley received a BA in historical studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a master’s from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, specializing in the history of South African resistance movements. She lived in Chicago for four years before moving to Dayton, OH. She began writing […]

The future is always closer than we think: Star Trek’s communicators to smartphones; Aldous Huxley’s soma to Prozac; Ray Bradbury’s seashells to earbuds. Tochi Onyebuchi is a science fiction author with a head full of visions, from automated police response to brains used as media storage to mechs piloted by vengeful women. A master of […]

With “100+ short stories, novelettes, and novellas,” the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a debut novel The Grace of Kings and second book in the Dandelion Dynasty Series The Wall of Storms, a Star Wars novel Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi The Legends of Luke Skywalker, and many translations (including Liu […]

With published fiction spanning three decades, you’ve probably read Walter Jon Williams, even if you don’t know it. He’s known for changing styles and writing both within genre and in defiance of genre definitions. His work has appeared on awards lists since the ’80s, including a Sidewise Award in ’96 for “Foreign Devils,” and Nebula […]

Victo Ngai’s images have captivated the science fiction community since her striking 2011 cover for Tor.com publishing’s Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order. It is a cover with soft pastels set against a dark, dangerous backdrop, with careful intimacy amidst the danger, and a spray of petals caught in […]