The New Weird (57 page)

The Modern World
(2007; published as
Dangerous Offspring
in the United States)

THOMAS, JEFFREY

Punktown
(2000)
Deadstock
(2007)

VANDERMEER, JEFF

Dradin, In Love
(1996)

City ofSaints & Madmen
(2001)

Veniss Underground
(2003)

City ofSaints & Madmen
(2003; expanded edition)

Secret Life
(2004)

Shriek An Afterword
(2006)

The Situation
(2008)

WILLIAMS, CONRAD

London Revenant
(2004)
The Unblemished
(2006)

Biographical Notes

DANIEL ABRAHAM
has published over two dozen short stories, winning the International Horror Guild Award for one of them. His upcoming publications include a novel written in collaboration with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
(Hunter'sRun),
a six-issue original comic book through the Dabel Brothers and Marvel Comics
(Wild Cards: Hard Call),
and the third and fourth novels of his Long Price Quartet (An
Autumn War
and
The Price of Spring).
He lives in New Mexico with his wife and daughter.

CLIVE BARKER
began his career in the arts as a playwright and director but began writing horror short stories in his spare time. In 1984 they were published, in three volumes, as
The Books of Blood.
Propelled by a Stephen King jacket quotation which read "I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker," the books sold extremely well and launched an award-winning career as a novelist and film director.

K. J. BISHOP
has written one novel,
The Etched City
(described in
Hoegbotton's Field Guide to the New Weird
as "a digressive, plotless book about nobodies who achieve nothing"), nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2004, and a small number of short stories. While continuing to work on a second book, she has caught the blogging bug and is currently producing an online comic,
Ecchi no City,
which makes amends for the heteronormativity of the abovementioned novel. She lives in Bangkok.

MICHAEL CISCO
is the author of
The Divinity Student, The Tyrant, The San Veneficio Canon,
and a contributor to
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, Leviathan
3 and 4, and
Album Zutique.
In 1999, his debut work received the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. His nonfiction appears in reference books published by Chelsea House and the Gale Group. Awarded his Ph.D. in English literature in 2003 (New York University), he is currently preparing his first critical work,
Supernatural Embarrassment,
for publication.

PAUL DI FILIPPO
, a Rhode Island native, has lived in the Lovecraftian stomping grounds of Providence for the past thirty-one years. His partner of that duration is Deborah Newton, and currently they play host to a cat named Penny Century and a chocolate cocker spaniel named ― what else? ― Brownie. He sold his first story in 1977, and well over one hundred since. His new novel,
Cosmocopia,
will appear in early 2008.

HAL DUNCAN
was born in 1971 and lives in the West End of Glasgow. A long-standing member of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, his first novel,
Vellum,
was nominated for the Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Society Award and the World Fantasy Award. The sequel,
Ink,
is available from Pan Macmillan in the UK and Del Rey in the US, while a novella is due out in November 2007 from MonkeyBrain Books.

BRIAN EVENSON
is the Director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. He is the author of six books of fiction, most recently
The Wavering Knife
(which won the International Horror Guild Award for best story collection) and
The Brotherhood of Mutilation.
He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Fremon and Jacques Jouet. He has received an O. Henry Prize as well as an NEA fellowship.

JEFFREY FORD
'S stories and novels have been nominated multiple times for the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Fountain Award, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. He has been the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards, for his second novel
The Physiognomy,
the short story collection
The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories,
and his short story "Creation."

FELIX GILMAN
was born and raised in London. He currently lives in New York, where he works as a lawyer. His first novel,
Thunderer,
will be published by Bantam Spectra in early 2008.

M. JOHN HARRISON
recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel
Nova Swing.
Other books include
In Viriconium,
nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize,
Climbers,
which won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award, and
Light,
co-winner of the 2003 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His short stories have appeared in many venues, including the
Times Literary Supplement
and the
Independent.
Since 1991 he has reviewed fiction for
TLS,
the
Guardian
and the
Daily Telegraph,
and young adult fiction in the
New York Times.

SIMON INGS
was born with a gift for numbers called "synaesthesia," the ability to experience regular mathematical patterns as colors behind his eyes. Around the age of nineteen, his synaesthesia started to fade, and he began writing novels in an attempt to explore the loss. Ings has since taken up more direct ways of dealing with these ideas ― he is currently working on the science book
The Eye: A Natural History ―
but numbers continue to exert a strong pull on his fiction, as the title of his fantastically intricate twentieth-century historical epic
The Weight ofNumbers
attests.

KATHE KOJA
has written numerous novels for young people and for adults, including
Skin
and
The Cipher;
her most recent is
Kissing the Bee
(Fsg/Foster). She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and blogs at
koja.wordpress.com.

LEENA KROHN
is a Finnish author who has received several prizes, including the Finlandia Prize for literature in 1992. Her short novel
Tainaron: Mail from Another City
was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award in 2005. Her books have been translated into English, Swedish, Estonian, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Latvian, French, and Norwegian.

JAY LAKE
lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. Recent novels include
Trial ofFlowers
from Night Shade Books and
Mainspring
from Tor Books, with sequels to both books due in 2008. Lake won the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and has been a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at
jaylake. livejournal.com.

MIKE LIBBY
is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes sculptures, models, collages, and drawings in a variety of media. For the past eight years, aside from developing his main body of work, Libby has maintained the side project of Insect Lab. In this widely acclaimed and extensive series, he adorns and integrates antique watch parts and electronic components with preserved insect specimens. Borrowing from both science fiction and science fact, these customized invertebrates present the confluences and contradictions between technology and nature, while providing visually rich results.

THOMAS LIGOTTI
has published several books now considered classics of dark fantasy, including
Songs of a Dead Dreamer
and
Grimscribe.
His work appears regularly in horror and fantasy magazines. An interest in music led him to a collaboration with the musical group Current 93 to produce
In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land,
a book accompanied by a CD containing background sounds and music intended to accompany the reading.

DARJA MALCOME-CLARKE
holds Masters degrees in Folklore and in English and is a Ph.D. candidate in the latter at Indiana University. Her areas of study are post-World War II literature (especially that of the speculative persuasion), gender and embodiment in literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her paper entitled "Subversive Metropolis: The Grotesque Body in the Phantasmic Urban Landscape," which addresses works by New Weird writers, won the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Graduate Student Award in 2006 and can be found in the Spring 2006 issue of
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
She attended Clarion West in 2004, and her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in
Clarkesworld Magazine,
the anthology
TEL: Stories, Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer,
and elsewhere. She is an articles editor for the online magazine
Strange Horizons.

CHINA MIÉVILLE
was born in London in 1972. When he was eighteen, he lived and taught English in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. Miéville has a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge and a Masters with distinction from the London School of Economics. His novel
Perdido Street Station
won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award. Subsequent novels
The Scar
and
Iron Council
have been up for multiple awards. He lives in London, England.

SARAH MONETTE
, having completed her Ph.D. in English literature, now lives and writes in a one-hundred-and-one-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her novels are published by Ace Books, and her short fiction has appeared in many places, including
Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, Alchemy,
and
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.
Visit her online at
www.sarahmonette.com
.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
is an iconic figure in literature, having written in perhaps every genre as well as producing such mainstream classics as
Mother London.
A multiple award-winner, he lives in Bastrop, Texas, with his wife Linda and several cats.

CAT RAMBO
lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest with her charming spouse, Wayne. She is a graduate of both Clarion West and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Among the places in which her work has appeared are
Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Asimov's SF,
and
Subterranean.
Cat Rambo is indeed her real name.

ALISTAIR RENNIE
was born in the North of Scotland and now lives in Bologna, Italy, where he works as an assistant editor. Prior to moving abroad, he worked as a painter and decorator and a core hand in the North Sea oil industry before studying and teaching literature at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He has published short fiction in
Electric Velocipede
and
Shadowed Realms
and nonfiction in the
Scottish Literary Journal
and Anna Tambour's
Virtuous Medlar Circle.
His forthcoming publications include short stories in
Electric Velocipede
and in the British anthology
Fabulous Whitby
(edited by Liz Williams and Sue Thomason). Among other things, Rennie is a keen musician and regular practitioner of outdoor activities and mountain sports, with a general interest in meteorology, wildlife, and folklore.

STEPH SWAINSTON
is the author of three novels,
The Year ofOurWar, No Present Like Time,
and
The Modern World,
the source of the excerpt in this volume. She studied archaeology at Cambridge and then worked as an archaeologist for three years, gaining an M.Phil. from the University of Wales. She has also researched herbal medicine and discovered traditional medicinal plants new to science. Swainston is a past finalist for the John W. Campbell Award and the British Fantasy Award.

JEFFREY THOMAS
has set a series of novels and short stories in the milieu of his story
Immolation,
which include the novels
Deadstock, Blue War, Health Agent,
and
Monstrocity,
plus the collections
Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey
and
Punktown: Third Eye.
In addition, Thomas's work has appeared in such anthologies as
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year's Best Horror Stories, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Leviathan
3 and
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.
Thomas lives with his wife Hong in Massachusetts.

CONRAD WILLIAMS
was born in 1969 and has been a published writer since 1988. He has sold around eighty short stories to a diverse range of publications and anthologies. He is the author of three novels,
Head Injuries, London Revenant,
and
The Unblemished;
three novellas,
Nearly People, Game,
and
The Scalding Rooms;
and a collection of short stories,
Use Once Then Destroy.
He is a past recipient of the Littlewood Arc Prize and the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Manchester with his wife, the writer Rhonda Carrier, their sons, Ethan and Ripley, and a monster Maine Coon cat called Reddie.