“Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1968 by Harlan Ellison. Renewed, © 1996 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison is a Registered Trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.
“O Come Little Children . . .” by Chet Williamson. Copyright © 1989 by Chet Williamson. First appeared in Spirits of Christmas. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“It’s a Wonderful Miracle on 34th Street’s Christmas Carol” by Brian Thomsen. Copyright © 2003 by Brian Thomsen.
“The Yattering and Jack” by Clive Barker. Copyright © 1984 by Clive Barker. First published in Books of Blood, Vol. 1. Reprinted by permission of the author and Little, Brown Company.
“Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop. Copyright © 1989 by Mercury Press, copyright © 1996 by Michael Bishop. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1989. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Miracle” by Connie Willis. Copyright © 1991 by Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1991. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Foreigner’s Christmas in China” by Maureen F. McHugh. Copyright © 1993 by Maureen F. McHugh. First published in Christmas Ghosts. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Household Words, Or The Powers-That-Be” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1993 by Howard Waldrop. First published in Amazing Stories, December 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“A Proper Santa Claus” by Anne McCaffrey. Copyright © 1973, 2001 by Anne McCaffrey. First appeared in Demon Kind. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.
“The Plot Against Santa Claus” by James Powell. Copyright © 1970 by James Powell, copyright renewed 1998. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1971. Reprinted by permission of the author.
About the Contributors
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Neil Gaiman is, quite simply, a world-class fantasist. Whether in his graphic novel series The Sandman or in his prose novels or story collections, he shows us—and the world around us—in the slightly skewed perspective that writers from Lord Dunsany to Ray Bradbury to Clive Barker to Terry Prachett favor, and, in truth, his unique voice manages to incorporate just about every major strain of traditional and modern fantasy and yet remain just that, unlike anyone else’s. Recent books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Stardust and the New York Times-bestselling American Gods.
William Gibson is the author of eight novels, including his latest, Pattern Recognition. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design of the New School of Social Research.
Richard Christian Matheson is the author of the popular novel Created By, a truly horrifying tale of trendy Hollywood. He’s even better known for his short stories in the fields of crime and dark suspense. Winner of the Bram Stoker award for best novel, Matheson has written many hours of television and movie scripts, presenting a view of the Southern California lifestyle in a fresh, genuinely chilling way. His style is both unique and startling. Nobody else approaches fiction in quite the same way.
Donald E. Westlake was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 12, 1933. He attended Champlain College, Plattsburgh, New York, and Harper College, Binghamton, New York, later Binghamton University. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Binghamton University in June 1996. He has published more than forty-five novels, which have been translated in fifteen languages. He has received three Edgar Awards, the major award of the Mystery Writers of America, for best novel, best screenplay and best short story. He has received the Grand Master award from MWA, and has served as their president. He has had five produced screenplays: Cops and Robbers (1971), Hot Stuff (1976), The Stepfather (1986), Why Me (1989) and The Grifters (1989), for which he was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Writer’s Guild of America Award. He serves on the Council for the Writer’s Guild of America and on the Board for the International Association of Crime Writers.
There is little Harlan Ellison has not done in the field of writing. He has authored over seventeen hundred short stories, four novels, essays, criticisms, plays and teleplays, and has been a constant force for excellence and experimentation in science fiction and fantasy. His works have pushed and often broken through the borders of what would be considered safe fiction by today’s society. Having won just about every award in the fiction field, including multiple Nebulas, Hugos and Writer’s Guild of America awards, he shows no sign of slowing down. He has also made his mark in the editing field, having put together the groundbreaking collection Dangerous Visions, and following that up with Again, Dangerous Visions, both books containing stories that at the time were deemed too controversial to publish elsewhere. Recently his enormous fifty-year retrospective, The Essential Ellison, was published to rave reviews.
Among Chet Williamson’s novels are Second Chance (soon to be reprinted in paperback), Ash Wednesday, Soulstorm, Lowland Rider, McKain’s Dilemma, Murder in Cormyr, Mordenheim, Reign, The Crow: Clash By Night, the paranormal suspense series The Searchers and a new children’s book, Pennsylvania Dutch Night Before Christmas. Nearly a hundred of his short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, Twilight Zone, and Magazine of F&SF, and many other magazines and anthologies. He has been a final nominee for the World Fantasy Award and the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and a six-time nominee for the Horror Writers Association’s Stoker Award.
Brian Thomsen is also the editor of A Date that Will Live in Infamy and the forthcoming The American Fantasy Tradition. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Clive Barker first gained prominence in the horror/dark fantasy genre with the publication of his seminal six-volume short story series The Books of Blood. He followed that up with a series of novels, including Weaveworld, Imajica and Sacrament, which blurred the line between literary fiction, imaginative fantasy and outright horror. He has been honored with British and World Fantasy awards and a nomination for the Booker Prize (one of Britain’s highest literary honors). His body of work in film is no less impressive, and includes the classic horror film Hellraiser, Candyman and the distinguished semi-autobiographical film about the life of director James Whale, Gods and Monsters.
Although generally considered a science fiction writer, Michael Bishop has made a career out of crossing back and forth between the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres. His novels A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, The Secret Ascension and the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time deploy the traditional science fiction themes of interplanetary adventure, alternate universes and time travel in stories that pose questions regarding human identity and social responsibility. Who Made Stevie Cry? is a darkly comic self-reflexive critique of horror fiction, and Unicorn Mountain a moving fantasy parable about coming to terms with terminal illness. In his World Fantasy Award- nominated novel Brittle Innings, he reworked the Frankenstein theme against the backdrop of minor league baseball. Some of his best short fiction has been collected in the anthologies Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden and At the City Limits of Fate.
Connie Willis is a multiple Nebula and Hugo award-winning author, primarily for her short fiction. Her novels include the powerful Doomsday Book, Uncharted Territory and Remake. Her short fiction has been collected in Fire Watch, Distress Call, Daisy, In the Sun and Impossible Things. In addition, she had edited The New Hugo Winners, Vol. III.
Maureen F. McHugh’s latest novel, Nekropolis (Eos), is out and she thinks it would be a nifty Christmas present. She once spent Christmas in China, but is happy to say, saw no ghosts.
Recent work from Howard Waldrop includes his short novel The Search for Tom Purdue from Subterranean Press, and the collection Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations, with stories co-written by such
authors as Steven Utley, George R. R. Martin, Bruce Sterling and William Saunders. A former advertising copywriter and “auditory research subject,” his fiction has garnered the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award. He lives in Texas.
L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) is best known as the creator of the Oz books, which eventually spanned more than fifteen novels, and, of course, spawned the world-famous film The Wizard of Oz. However, the Oz books overshadow his talents as a writer of poetry, plays and other fiction, most notably the fantasy novels The Master Key and Queen Zixi of Ix. Readers interested in more Santa Claus stories should look up The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a lighthearted take on Saint Nick.
Bret Harte (1836-1902) was once the highest-paid short story writer in America. He achieved tremendous popularity because of his talent for capturing the sights, sounds and feel of the Old West, which provided the settings for such stories as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” He remains one of the great writers on the subject of pioneer California, the state that stole his heart.
Anne McCaffrey was the first woman to win both the Nebula and the Hugo awards for her science fiction. She is best known for her popular “Pern” series, which includes the novels Dragonsflight, Dragonsquest, The White Dragon and Dragonsdawn. Other novels include The Crystal Singer, Killashandra, Nerika’s Story, The Rowan and Damia. Among her novels for younger readers are Dragonsong, Dragonsinger and Dragondrums. She lives in Ireland.
Anne McCaffrey has said the following about her life: “The early lessons I learned, generally the hard way, in standing up for myself and my egocentricities, being proud of being ‘different,’ doing my own thing, gave me the strength of purpose to continue doing so in later life. You have to learn how not to conform, how to avoid labels. But it isn’t easy! It’s lonely until you realize that you have inner resources that those of the herd mentality cannot enjoy. That’s where the mind learns the freedom to think science-fictiony things, and where early lessons of tenacity, pure bullheadedness, can make a difference. Most people prefer to be accepted. I learned not to be.” (From “Retrospection,” in Women of Vision, edited by Denise Du Pont, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1988.)
James Powell was born in Toronto in 1932. After graduating from the University of Toronto he spent three years in France studying and teaching in French high schools. He has worked in educational publishing and for a weekly newspaper in the Midwest and has edited an antiques newspaper in Pennsylvania. He has published over 120 short stories of a mysterious and humorous sort. They have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Playboy, among others, and are reprinted regularly in The Best Detective Stories of the Year and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology series. In 1989 the readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine voted his “A Dirge for Clowntown” their favorite story of the year. In 1990 his story collection A Murder Coming was published in Canada and he was a co-recipient of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Derrick Murdock Award “for making a long Canadian story short.” A Canadian citizen, he lives in Marietta, Pennsylvania, with his American wife.
A Yuletide Universe Page 26