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Both Anderson and Dickson wrote both adult and Young Adult novels. Both were Guests of Honor of the annual World Science Fiction Conventions (1959 for Anderson; 1984 for Dickson), and both won Hugo and Nebula awards. Many readers noted very strong plot parallels between Anderson’s novelette “Call Me Joe” (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1957) and James Cameron’s December 2009 s-f motion picture Avatar. Dickson’s short story “St. Dragon and the George” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1957, expanded into the novel The Dragon and the George, Doubleday, July 1976) was purchased by the producers Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass and used for its plot for their August 1982 Rankin/Bass Productions’ animated cartoon feature The Flight of Dragons, nominally based upon the story-less picture book by Peter Dickinson.
6. Reginald Bretnor (1911-1992) was born Alfred Reginald Kahn in Vladivostok, Russia. He moved with his parents to Japan in 1917, and to America in 1920. He changed his name to Alfred Reginald Bretnor after his maternal grandmother, and wrote under the names of Reginald Bretnor or R. Bretnor, although one source says that he also wrote fantasy, science fiction, mysteries, children's stories, military theory and public affairs articles under a variety of pseudonyms for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Southwest Review, Today's Woman, and many other publications. He was the translator of the first known book about cats, François-Augustin de Paradis de Moncrif’s 1727 Histoire des Chats : dissertation sur la prééminence des chats dans la société, sur les autres animaux d'Égypte, sur les distinctions et privilèges dont ils ont joui personnellement (Golden Cockerel Press, 1961).
His first story was published in 1947. He was primarily an author of short stories, and an editor of anthologies of and about science fiction, although his one novel was a mystery, A Killing in Swords (Pocket Books, 1978). (One of his short stories, “Sugar Plum”, Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1952, is now in the public domain and has been reprinted as a “novel” since 2011, but it is only 32 pages long.) Bretnor’s other books are expansions or collections of his short s-f; The Schimmelhorn File: Memoirs of a Dirty Old Genius (Ace Books, February 1979; six of his ten “Papa Schimmelhorn” stories from 1950 to 1987), Gilpin’s Space (Ace Books, June 1986), and The Timeless Tales of Reginald Bretnor (selected and edited by Fred Flaxman, Story Books, January 1997; fifteen stories). Bretnor is most famous (or notorious) as the author of the 89 ultra-short “Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot” shameless s-f puns, written as “Grendel Briarton”; for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1956 to 1964; for Asimov’s Science Fiction from 1977 to 1982, and for Amazing SF/Amazing Stories from 1983 to 1987 (with a couple in Venture Science Fiction and Weird Tales). There have been at least three collections of all the “Feghoots” written up to the time of publication; one also including winners and runners-up of a Feghoot contest run by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He wrote the articles on science fiction for two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among his non-s-f works are Decisive Warfare: A Study in Military Theory (Stackpole Books, January 1969; reprinted by Borgo Press, December 1986) and Of Force and Violence and Other Imponderables: Essays on War, Politics, and Government (Borgo Press, November 1992).
Bretnor was the editor of Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future (Coward McCann, January 1953, reprinted by Advent: Publishers, June 1979), the first round-table discussion of s-f as serious literature, with essays by John W. Campbell, Jr., Anthony Boucher, Don Fabun, Fletcher Pratt, Rosalie Moore, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip Wylie, Gerald Heard, and Bretnor himself. Other Bretnor anthologies of s-f criticism are Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow: A Discursive Symposium (Harper & Row, December 1974) and The Craft of Science Fiction (Harper & Row, August 1976). Further Bretnor-edited anthologies are the three The Future at War volumes of military s-f (Ace Books, August 1979, March and June 1980).
7. Martha Soukup (1959- ) has written over thirty short stories since 1986, including the Nebula Award-winning “A Defense of the Social Contracts” (Science Fiction Age, September 1993) which was also nominated for a Hugo and a James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She has two collections of her stories, Rosemary’s Brain: and Other Tales of Wonder (Wildside Press, Septemer 1992) and The Arbitrary Placement of Walls (DreamHaven Books, September 1997). As a playwright for the San Francisco Bay Area’s Monday Night PlayGround group, she won their June Anne Baker Prize in 2003 for her play “Cold Calls”.
8. Michael H. Payne (1965- ) was one of the first notable authors specializing in anthropomorphic fiction, starting with “Rat’s Reputation” in the first anthro-specialty magazine, FurVersion, in 1989. He had stories in the long-running Yarf! through most of the 1990s and into the early 2000s. His novelette “Crow’s Curse” won third place in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future contest in 1991, and he had short fiction published throughout the 1990s and 2000s in such print and online magazines as Anthrolations, Artemis, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature, Claw & Quill, Helix SF, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Mythagoras, New Fables, Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, and TransVersions, and in five volumes of the annual original-fiction anthology Sword and Sorceress, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley and by Elisabeth Waters after Bradley’s death; his story “Familiars” in Sword and Sorceress XIX won the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction in 2002. He has published one novel, The Blood Jaguar (Tor Books, December 1998).
His cartoon strip Terebinth has appeared in print magazines and online, and his other strip, Daily Grind, is only online; he is also the Registrar for the Web Cartoonist’s Choice Awards. He graduated from the University of California, Irvine, and still hosts KUCI’s weekly two-hour Darkling Eclectica radio program. He was the book reviewer for Tangent, and for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s website since 1999; he is also the head coordinator for SFWA’s Circulating Book Plan. Professionally, Payne works at the front desk in the Newport Beach (California) Public Library.
9. Roland J. Green (1944- ) has been a full-time writer since 1973. His first novel was the sword-&-sorcery fantasy Wandor’s Ride (Avon, July 1973), followed by three sequels to 1981, but his main writing from 1974 through 1984 was the “Richard Blade” series (28 of the 37 novels) under Pinnacle Books’ house pseudonym of Jeffrey Lord. In the 1980s he returned to writing under his own name, specializing in military s-f and action fantasy with the Starcruiser Shenandoah series (six novels, 1989 to 1994), seven Conan the Barbarian novels (1988 to 1997), and four Dragonlance: Warriors novels (1995 to 1997), among others. He has co-written sequels to H. Beam Piper’s Horseclans/Lord Kalvan novels with John F. Carr from 1987 to 2003. In addition to his novels, Green has written two dozen short stories. Health problems have curtailed his writing since the mid-2000s.
10. Paul Di Filippo (1954- ) has the honor of being a regular s-f book reviewer for Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Nova Express, Science Fiction Eye, and Science Fiction Weekly; he has also reviewed for non-s-f publications including The San Francisco Chronicle and The Washington Post. His first short story was “Falling Expectations” in UnEarth, Winter 1977; today he is the author of thirteen novels (two as Philip Lawson, in collaboration with Michael Bishop), including a 2006 authorized sequel to the 1954 Universal horror film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and fourteen collections of his short stories. His short stories include sixty-seven s-f satires in one series, “Plumage from Pegasus”, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Among his other short stories are such memorable titles as “The Ballad of Sally Nutrasweet™”, “The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party”, “Master Blaster and Whammer Jammer Meet the Groove Thang”, “Otto and Toto in the Oort”, “Professor Fluvius’s Palace of Many Waters”, “The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet”, and “Ultrasenator Versus the Lobbyists from Beyond!” Nine storie
s, collected in Lost Pages (Four Walls Eight Windows, October 1998), reimagine such authors as Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, Franz Kafka, Thomas Pyncheon, Theodore Sturgeon and others as nuclear scientists, costumed heroes and more (Philip K. Dick travels to an alternate world to save America from dictator Rush Limbaugh), in adventures mimicking the writing styles of those authors. Among Di Filippo’s other writings is the script for a 2005 sequel to the Alan Moore/Gene Ha/Zander Cannon 2000-01 s-f/superhero comic book series Top 10, titled Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct (illustrated by Jerry Ordway).
11. Scott Bradfield (1955- ) was born in San Francisco, and has taught at universities in California and Connecticut, but has lived in London since the 1980s. (He currently teaches at Kingston University.) He has written short stories, novels, literary criticism, and reviews for numerous magazines, mostly “little”, such as Bookform, Buzz Magazine, Elle, Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, The Independent, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Ghost, The New York Times Book Review, The Observer, The Printer’s Devil, The Times (London) Literary Supplement, Triquarterly, Vice, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories; and for film, radio, and television. His novels include The History of Luminous Motion (Bloomsbury, July 1989), What’s Wrong With America (St. Martin’s Press, September 1994), Animal Planet (Picador USA, October 1995), Good Girl Wants It Bad (Carroll & Graf, July 2004), and The People Who Watched Her Pass By (Two Dollar Radio, April 2010). His short fiction has been gathered into four collections since 1988; “Doggy Love” appears in his Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance (Carroll & Graf, July 2005). His first novel was filmed as the May 2000 Artistic License Films’ feature Luminous Motion; Bradfield wrote the screenplay. Animal Planet is a modern satiric capitalistic pastiche of Orwell’s Animal Farm; humans uplift all animals into intelligence to turn them into “equal” working-class employees and money-spending consumers. Some of his literary criticisms have been collected into Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of American Romance (University Of Iowa Press, July 1993). He first presented his Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved as the Seymour Fischer Lecture at the Free University of Berlin, on January 17, 2001; he has since expanded it and published it online.
12. Susan Palwick (1961- ) attended Princeton and Yale, and is currently an English professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first story was “The Woman Who Saved the World” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1985. Her first two novels won awards (Flying in Place, Tor Books, May 1992, the Crawford Award for Best First Novel; and The Necessary Beggar, Tor Books, September 2005, the Alex Award from the American Library Association, and The Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame), and she has won others including the Rhysling Award for Best Fantastic Poetry for her poem “The Neighbor’s Wife” in Amazing Stories, July 1985. Her other books include a third novel, Shelter (Tor Books, June 2007), named among the top ten s-f novels of the year by both Amazon.com and Library Journal, and a collection of her short stories (twenty-four to date), The Fate of Mice (Tachyon Publications, February 2007).
13. Mickey Zucker Reichert (1962- ) is best-known for her fantasy novels based upon Norse mythology, all for DAW Books: The Last of the Renshai (January 1992), The Western Wizard (August 1992), Child of Thunder (April 1993), Beyond Ragnarok (August 1995), Prince of Demons (November 1996), The Children of Wrath (June 1998), and Flight of the Renshai (September 2009), with more coming; also two volumes of The Bifrost Guardians collections (separately from DAW Books in 1988-1990), Godslayer/Shadow Climber/Dragonrank Master (July 2000) and Shadows Realm/By Chaos Cursed (November 2000), and the two Books of Barakhai, The Beasts of Barakhai (August 2001) and The Lost Dragons of Barakhai (August 2002). She has also written authorized sequels to Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”, The Legend of Nightfall (December 1993) and The Return of Nightfall (September 2004), and she has a contract to write three “prequel” novels to Asimov’s I, Robot stories, the first of which is I, Robot: To Protect (Roc, November 2011). She has other s-f novels unconnected to a series, and over fifty short stories.
According to her website, Reichert is a working pediatrician, and “She has a heart of warm oatmeal for anything living, and cannot seem to say "no" to helping them. She (and her husband) have been foster and adoptive parents not only to children but also to every animal from mice to horses, including some of the weirder ones like large snakes, llamas, exotic parrots, a squirrel, opossums, foxes, pigs, lizards, hermit crabs, peacocks, turkeys, guineas, finches, songbirds, and even rats. They have drawn the line at elephants, although they did once have a Newfoundland and a Bernese Mountain dog. Most of their animals have come to them as finds, strays, and castoffs.”
14. Harding Young (1968- ) is the pseudonym of William R. Young, a native of Ontario's Niagara Region. He studied literature at the University of Toronto before attending and graduating from the playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada – which led to several years in Montreal writing for the stage. In 2000, he returned to Toronto to begin a career in government communications, and has turned his pen to writing crime and fantasy fiction. His publications include a play under his real name set in outer-space, Eden’s Moon, in the anthology New Canadian Drama - Volume 8, Speculative Drama edited by Scott Duchesne (Borealis Press, October 2001), and a short-story about violent revenge in the now defunct Canadian Storyteller Magazine. More recently, his work has appeared on the web-zine Powder Burn Flash. He currently resides in Toronto where he is working on finishing his first novel, and writes a blog (Oriolelounge.com) about cocktails, fiction and caring for a diabetic (though no longer homicidal) cat.
15. Frederick Water Patten (1940- ) has lived in Los Angeles, California all his life. He began reading science fiction in 1950 with Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein (Gnome Press, December 1949), and started collecting s-f about 1953. In 1960 he joined the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, of which he is still an active member. In 1963 he wrote his UCLA Master’s thesis in library science on the works of Andre Norton. He has been active in too many science fiction, comic book, and other fan clubs to mention, including being a founding member of Japanese anime fandom in 1977 and of anthropomorphics fandom in 1980. He began writing animation, s-f, and anthropomorphic book reviews in 1966 and has had over 700 published to date. He was a professional librarian from 1963 to 1990, and worked at Streamline Pictures, one of the pioneering companies to license Japanese s-f animation for American theatrical and video distribution, from 1991 to 2002. He co-founded the annual Ursa Major Award for the best in anthropomorphic literature and fiction in 2001. He is the author of numerous articles on anime, comic books, and science fiction from the 1970s to date. His books include three editions of An Anthropomorphic Bibliography (Yarf!, January 1995, August 1996, January 2000), the last consisting of an annotated list of over 500 novels and short-story collections featuring anthropomorphized animals; the award-winning Best in Show: Fifteen Years of Outstanding Furry Fiction (Sofawolf Press, 2003; reprinted as Furry!: The World’s Best Anthropomorphic Fiction (iBooks, 2006) as editor; and Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews (Stone Bridge Press, 2004) as author; and he has contributed to The Animated Movie Guide edited by Jerry Beck; Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, the World of Cartoon, Anime, and CGI edited by Jerry Beck, Animation in Asia and the Pacific edited by John A. Lent, plus many others. In 2005 he suffered a major stroke, and has been semi-paralyzed in a convalescent hospital ever since, maintaining his writing and editorial activities via laptop computer from his hospital bed. He currently reviews books on animation for the online Animation World Network, and anthro fiction for the online Anthro and Flayrah magazines. After his stroke, he donated his lifetime collection to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside’s Tomás Rivera Library’s Special Collections & Archives. It took almost 900 boxes to transfer Patten’s donation, which consisted of almost 500,000 separate items, to the UCR
Library.