by Richard Klaw
No one else was scheduled until three. Anders opened the workroom to get his own lunch and a book. He was studying Koko now, a gorilla raised by a Stanford graduate student and taught to sign. He planned to eat inside with his gorillas, but Miss Elliot arrived instead. “Have lunch with me,” she said. “I made cookies. It’s a beautiful day.”
Miss Elliot often came at lunchtime. She had no real interest in Anders, or so Anders thought. Her own upbringing as the baby of a large, loving family had left her with a certain amount of affection to spare. She regarded Anders as a project. No healthy young man could be allowed to molder among the exhibits. Get him out. Give him a bit of medicinal companionship. Miss Elliot wore a uniform with an elephant on the sleeve and below that the black circle. Miss Elliot showed the elephants, but they weren’t her elephants and Anders doubted she even understood the distinction.
If he refused her offer: he would face her brand of implacable, perky determination. He found it unendurable. So he nodded instead and put the book back beside his tools and his sketches. He joined her at the exit, opening the door.
Miss Elliot shook her head. “You always forget,” she said. Her tone was indulgent but firm. She reached back past him, brushing across the black circle on his sleeve, and threw the switch that turned the gorillas off. They ate lunch on the grass outside the Hall of Extinction. The cookies were stale. The flowers were in bloom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Greek slave Aesop (620–560 BC) became legendary for his series of morality tales.
World Fantasy Award-winning author James P. Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story “The Ape-Box Affair,” published in Unearth magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story. Recent publications include The Knights of the Cornerstone, The Ebb Tide, and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled The Aylesford Skull, to be published by Titan Books.
Best remembered as the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) worked in many genres during his prolific career. He introduced the popular characters John Carter and David Innes and their unique worlds: Barsoom, a savage Mars, and Pellucidar, a hollow Earth civilization. Burroughs revolutionized publishing when he incorporated (one of the first authors to do so) as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. to produce his books and manage his many properties. His far-reaching influence can still be witnessed today in the Star Wars series and successful films such as Avatar.
Hugh B. Cave (1910–2004) was born in England and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. His prolific writing career began in 1929 when he published the first of more than 800 pulp fiction stories. With the demise of pulps, he moved on to slick magazines and books, writing 350 short stories and novelettes and forty-nine books. Cave was published more than 2,400 times during his life. He received the 1978 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection (Murgunstrumm and Others), and Lifetime Achievement awards from the Horror Writers Association (1991), International Horror Guild (1998) and the World Fantasy Association (1999). (source: Milt Thomas)
Gio Clairval, an Italian-born writer of speculative fiction who lives in Paris, translates classics from French, Italian, Spanish, and German into English. Her latest translations can be found in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthologies The Weird (2011) and ODD? (2011). The first English translation of acclaimed French author Claude Seignolle’s collection of stories set in 1950 Paris is forthcoming in winter, 2012. Visit Gio at www.gioclairval.blogspot.com.
Scott A. Cupp is a short story writer and essayist from San Antonio, Texas. He has worked in the science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, and comics fields. He has reviewed westerns and horror novels for Mystery Scene Magazine and currently does Forgotten Movies and Forgotten Books for the Missions Unknown blog. He has been a comic reader for more than fifty years. He became an ape fan when seeing King Kong for the first time in the early 1960s.
The author of dozens of books and even more short stories, Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) revolutionized science fiction with his 1952 short story (later a novel) “The Lovers,” the first known science fiction tale to portray sex between a human and a non-humanoid alien. The winner of three Hugo Awards and the Grand Master Award in 2001, his best known series, Riverworld, was made into two TV movies, both for the SyFy Channel. He is also well known for his detailed biography of Tarzan and for his novel Venus on the Half-Shell, written under the alias of Kilgore Trout, a character created by novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Mark Finn is an author, actor, essayist, and playwright. His biography, Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2007 and is now in a second edition. Finn is the author of two books of fiction, Gods New and Used and Year of the Hare, as well as hundreds of articles, essays, reviews, and short stories, for The University of Texas Press, RevolutionSF.com, Greenwood Press, Dark Horse Comics, Wildside Press, MonkeyBrain Books, and others. He lives in North Texas with his long-suffering wife, too many books, and an affable pit bull named Sonya.
Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) most famously penned the “immoral” Madame Bovary. His scrupulously detailed and artistic works often reflected a scorn for French bourgeois society. An acknowledged master of the form, Flaubert is one of the most important forces in the development of the modern novel. Flaubert is buried at Rouen Cemetery in Normandy, France, alongside another literary giant, Marcel Duchamp.
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections, including Sarah Canary, which won the California Book Award Silver Medal in 1991, and The Jane Austen Book Club, which was a New York Times bestseller. Her collection, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, won the 2011 World Fantasy Award. A new novel tentatively titled We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is scheduled for publication in May 2013.
Robert Ervin Howard (1906–1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery genre. Known foremost for the character Conan, Howard’s characters include Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn. Passionate about literature and writing from youth, Howard died at age thirty after only twelve years as an author. He wrote over 800 stories and poems, which take us to such divergent surroundings as the ancient Atlantis, the North African desert, secret opium dens, boxing arenas, and battlefields.
Having only published a few short stories in his lifetime, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) died largely unknown. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Thankfully, Brod overrode those wishes and began publishing the now-classic stories of alienation.
Leigh Kennedy was born in Denver, Colorado, where she began writing stories early in her teens, and later earned a degree in history. She lived in Austin, Texas, for five years, then moved to England over twenty-five years ago. Published on both sides of the Atlantic, Faces was her first short story collection, followed by two novels, The Journal of Nicholas the American and Saint Hiroshima. Recently, a second collection, Wind Angels, was published. Another novel is in progress. Some of her survival strategies have involved deciphering doctors’ handwriting, answering phones, and alphabetizing things. She has two grown children and is at home in Hastings.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010), Glamour in Glass (Tor, 2012), and the 2011 Hugo Award-winning short story “For Want of a Nail.” Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Cosmos, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Kowal, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago, Illinois. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories and articles. He has written screenplays and comic scripts and for animation. He has been awarded numerous recognitions for his work, including an Edgar Award, eight Bram Sto
ker Awards, a World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, and has just received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife Karen.
Pat Murphy is a writer, a scientist, and a toy maker. She has written a handful of novels, including The Wild Girls, Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, and The Falling Woman. Her fiction has won the Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as the 2002 Seiun Award. Currently, Murphy works for Klutz, a publisher of kids’ how-to books that come with cool stuff. Her most recent book with Klutz is Paper Flying Dragons, which comes with twelve dragons that really fly.
Jess Nevins is the author of seven books and roleplaying games, including The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (MonkeyBrain, 2005), a guide to the characters and concepts of fantastic nineteenth-century literature, and The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes (PS Publishing, 2012). He has written numerous essays and articles on popular culture, and thinks primates are cool, pulp primates cooler, and talking pulp primates the coolest of all. He is a librarian at Lone Star College in Tomball, Texas.
Though he published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827, followed by Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1839, Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) did not achieve recognition until the publication of “The Raven” in 1845. A seminal figure in the development of science fiction, horror, and the detective story, Poe’s works influenced the writings of Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and countless others.
A member of the legendary Lovecraft Circle, Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), wrote over 100 highly ornate and poetic short stories, primarily for the pulp magazines. Alongside Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, he formed the great triumvirate of Weird Tales contributors.
Steven Utley, a founding member of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop that emerged in Texas during the 1970s, has published hundreds of stories, essays, and poems. Gardner Dozois, who published most of Utley’s output during the 1990s in Asimov’s Science Fiction, declares that he “may be the most underrated science fiction writer alive...able to turn his hand to almost any subject matter, mood, or type of story imaginable.” Since 1997, Utley has lived in Tennessee.
A bizarre cross-pollination of Cyril Kornbluth and Philip José Farmer, Howard Waldrop’s writings incorporate a wide range of subjects including alternate history, American popular culture, the American South, old movies, classical mythology, and rock 'n’ roll music. He has been nominated for numerous awards, and “The Ugly Chickens” won both a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. Waldrop’s most recent book is his tenth short story collection, Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction 1989–2003 (Old Earth Books, 2008). He lives in Austin, Texas.
Director of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt co-founded Picture Farm, the award-winning London and New York-based production collective. His first film, The Escapist, was nominated for a British Independent Film Award, Evening Standard British Film Award, and London Critics’ Circle Film Award. Wyatt lives in Los Angeles with his wife, screenwriter Erica Beeney, and their son Theodore.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Professional reviewer, geek maven, and optimistic curmudgeon, Richard “Rick” Klaw is the co-editor of the groundbreaking original anthology of short fiction in graphic form, Weird Business, the editor of The Big Bigfoot Book, and the co-founder of Mojo Press, one of the first publishers to produce both graphic and prose novels. He also served as the initial fiction editor for RevolutionSF. Klaw has written countless reviews, essays, and fiction for a variety of publications including The Austin Chronicle, Blastr, Moving Pictures Magazine, San Antonio Current, GeekDad, Conversations with Texas Writers (University of Texas Press), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Greenwood Press), King Kong Is Back! (BenBella Books), Farscape Forever (BenBella Books), SF Site, Science Fiction Weekly, Nova Express, Steampunk (Tachyon Publications), Electric Velocipede, Cross Plains Universe (MonkeyBrain/FACT), and The Steampunk Bible (Abrahams). Many of Klaw’s essays and observations are collected behind a magnificent ape cover in Geek Confidential: Echoes from the 21st Century (MonkeyBrain).
He can often be found pontificating on Twitter (@rickklaw) and his acclaimed genre blog The Geek Curmudgeon (http://www.revolutionsf.com/revblogs/geekcurmudgeon). Klaw lives in Austin, TX, with his wife Brandy, a dog, a cat, and lots of ape memorabilia.
The editor would like to thank Mike Croteau, Marty Halpern, Lewis Shiner, Jeff VanderMeer, Bud Webster, and Mark London Williams for their help. Additional kudos to Jacob Weisman and Jill Roberts for their amazing support and guidance. And most importantly to Brandy Whitten, my wife and partner, without whom this book may never have come to pass.