Harlan Jay Ellison was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction and for his outspoken, combative personality. His published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. Some of his best-known works include the 1967 Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", considered by some to be the greatest episode of Star Trek ever(he subsequently wrote a book about the experience that includes his original screenplay), his A Boy and His Dog cycle, and his short stories "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman". He was also editor and anthologist for Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison won numerous awards, including multiple Hugos, Nebulas, and Edgars.
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations among human psychology, technology, sex, and the mass media. Ballard became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels, such as The Drowned World (1962), but also courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.
The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
Thomas Iver Bradley is an American novelist, essayist and writer of short stories. He is the author of The Sam Edwine Pentateuch, a five-book series, various volumes of which have been nominated for the Editor's Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Award Series in the Novel. Tom Bradley's nonfiction is regularly featured by Arts & Letters Daily, and has also appeared in Salon.com, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Ambit Magazine. He has been characterized as an "outsider" by the LA Times book blog.
Kij Johnson is an American writer of fantasy. She is a faculty member at the University of Kansas.
Theodore Edwin White is a Hugo Award-winning American science fiction writer, editor and fan, as well as a music critic. He writes and edits as Ted White. In addition to books and stories written under his own name, he has also co-authored novels with Dave van Arnam as Ron Archer, and with Terry Carr as Norman Edwards.
Steve Aylett is an English author of satirical science fiction, fantasy, and slipstream. According to the critic Bill Ectric, "much of Aylett’s work combines the bawdy, action-oriented style of Voltaire with the sedentary, faux cultivated style of Peacock." Stylistically, Aylett is often seen as a difficult writer. As the critic Robert Kiely suggests, his books tend to be "baroque in their density, speed, and finely crafted detail; they are overcrowded, they dazzle and distort and wait for us to catch up with their narrative world."
Otto Oscar Binder was an American author of science fiction and non-fiction books and stories, and comic books. He is best known as the co-creator of Supergirl and for his many scripts for Captain Marvel Adventures and other stories involving the entire superhero Marvel Family. He was prolific in the comic book field and is credited with writing over 4,400 stories across a variety of publishers under his own name, as well as more than 160 stories under the pen-name Eando Binder.
Eckhard Gerdes is an American novelist and editor.
Bizarro fiction is a contemporary literary genre which often uses elements of absurdism, satire, and the grotesque, along with pop-surrealism and genre fiction staples, in order to create subversive, weird, and entertaining works. The term was adopted in 2005 by the independent publishing companies Eraserhead Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press, and Afterbirth Books. Much of its community revolves around Eraserhead Press, which is based in Portland, Oregon, and has hosted the annual BizarroCon since 2008. The introduction to the first Bizarro Starter Kit describes Bizarro as "literature's equivalent to the cult section at the video store" and a genre that "strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read." According to Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press: "Basically, if an audience enjoys a book or film primarily because of its weirdness, then it is Bizarro. Weirdness might not be the work's only appealing quality, but it is the major one."
Terence William (Terry) Dowling, is an Australian writer and journalist. He writes primarily speculative fiction though he considers himself an "imagier" – one who imagines, a term which liberates his writing from the constraints of specific genres. He has been called "among the best-loved local writers and most-awarded in and out of Australia, a writer who stubbornly hews his own path ."
The Kafka Effekt (2001) is the debut book of American author D. Harlan Wilson. It contains forty-four irreal short stories and flash fiction and has been said to combine the milieus of Franz Kafka and William S. Burroughs. Along with Carlton Mellick III's Satan Burger, Vincent Sakowski's Some Things Are Better Left Unplugged, Hertzan Chimera's Szmonhfu, Kevin L. Donihe's Shall We Gather at the Garden? and M.F. Korn's Skimming the Gumbo Nuclear, The Kafka Effekt was among the first books jointly released by Bizarro fiction publisher Eraserhead Press.
John Skipp is a splatterpunk horror and fantasy author and anthology editor, as well as a songwriter, screenwriter, film director, and film producer. He collaborated with Craig Spector on multiple novels, and has also collaborated with Marc Levinthal and Cody Goodfellow. He worked as editor-in-chief of both Fungasm Press and Ravenous Shadows.
Bradley Sands is an American author and editor. He is involved in the Bizarro movement in underground literature with Steve Aylett, Chris Genoa, Carlton Mellick III and D. Harlan Wilson.
Jill Bauman is an American artist. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award five times and nominated for the Chesley Award several times. Her art has been exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum, the Moore College of Art, Art Students League of New York, the NY Illustrators Society & and the Science Fiction Museum of Seattle. Bauman has created hundreds of book covers for horror, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, and best selling books including 23 of the Cat Who... books by Lilian Jackson Braun during the 1980s and 1990s.
Technologized Desire: Selfhood & the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction (2009) is a book of literary and cultural criticism by American author D. Harlan Wilson. The book analyzes the evolution of technology, the self, subjectivity, culture, commodity fetishism and capitalism as it has been represented by postmodern science fiction novels and films. Ultimately Wilson points to a postcapitalist subjectivity that is an extension of technocapitalism.
Jason Colavito is an American author and independent scholar specializing in the study of fringe theories particularly around ancient history and extraterrestrials. Colavito has written a number of books, including The Cult of Alien Gods (2005), The Mound Builder Myth (2020), and Legends of the Pyramids (2021).
Chris Kelso is a British Fantasy Award-nominated writer, illustrator, and anthologist from Scotland.
The New Press is an independent non-profit public-interest book publisher established in 1992 by André Schiffrin and Diane Wachtell, publishing many books with a left-wing political viewpoint.
Nebula Award Stories 1965 is an anthology of science fiction short works edited by Damon Knight. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1966, with a Science Fiction Book Club edition following in October of the same year. The first British edition was published by Gollancz in 1967. Paperback editions followed from Pocket Books in the U.S. in November 1967, and New English Library in the U.K. in April 1969. The U.K. and paperback editions bore the variant title Nebula Award Stories 1. The book was more recently reissued by Stealth Press in hardcover in February 2001. It has also been published in German.
