Peter A. Balaskas (born 1969 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American author of speculative fiction.
Balaskas received his BS in Chemistry (minor in English) and his MA in English with a double emphasis in Creative Writing and Literature from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. [1] Before focusing on professional writing, Balaskas worked as an environmental chemist, a theatre actor, a page for NBC Studios, a camera technician for the soap opera Passions, and a copy editor. His fiction and poetry have been published in The Aroostook Review, Del Sol Review, Neon Beam Magazine, Pale Skies, Sage of Consciousness, Bewildering Stories, and his critical essay on Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" was published in Criterion. [1] He cites Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King as some of his early influences. [2] [3]
Balaskas is perhaps best known for his award-winning novella, The Grandmaster, a supernatural tale about a Jewish prisoner during the Holocaust who uses psionic powers to liberate a concentration camp. Published in 2007 by Bards and Sages Publishing, the book won the Best Science Fiction novel at both the Hollywood Book Festival and New England Book Festival in 2008, and was a top ten finlist in the 2007 Preditors and Editors Reader’s Poll. He was also named 2009 Publicist of the Year by the Book Publicists of Southern California.
In 2004, Balaskas created Ex Machina Press, a micro press that produces the annual anthology Silent Voices: A Creative Mosaic of Fiction, [2] for which he served as sole-founder and Managing Editor. Due to the recession, he closed Ex Machina Press and is now dedicating his time to his fiction writing.
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.
Reginald Bretnor was an American science fiction author who flourished between the 1950s and 1980s. Most of his fiction was in short story form, and usually featured a whimsical story line or ironic plot twist. He also wrote on military theory and public affairs, and edited some of the earliest books to consider SF from a literary theory and criticism perspective.
Dangerous Visions is a science fiction short story anthology edited by American writer Harlan Ellison and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. It was published in 1967.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Jeff VanderMeer is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. He has also edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.
Judith Josephine Grossman, who took the pen-name Judith Merril around 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist, and one of the first women to be widely influential in those roles.
Jack Dann is an American writer best known for his science fiction, as well as an editor and a writing teacher, who has lived in Australia since 1994. He has published over seventy books, the majority being as editor or co-editor of story anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He has published nine novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, essays, and poetry, and his books have been translated into thirteen languages. His work, which includes fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and historical and alternative history genres, has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick.
"Croatoan" is a short story by American writer Harlan Ellison, published in 1975 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and both anthologized in Strange Wine and released in an illustrated version in Heavy Metal in 1978. The story won a Locus Award. The story is also used for a specimen of analysis by Stephen King in Danse Macabre.
"From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet" is a collection by American writer Harlan Ellison, including 26 extremely short stories on abstract and basically unrelated topics, displaying various aspects of Ellison's preoccupations with morality, mythology, the trivia of history, and humor. He wrote the collection in three days in the window of a bookstore.
"Jeffty Is Five" is a fantasy short story by American author Harlan Ellison. It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1977, then was included in DAW's The 1978 Annual World's Best SF in 1978 and Ellison's short story collection Shatterday two years later. According to Ellison, it was partially inspired by a fragment of conversation that he misheard at a party at the home of actor Walter Koenig: "How is Jeff?" "Jeff is fine. He's always fine," which he perceived as "Jeff is five, he's always five." Ellison based the character of Jeffty on Joshua Andrew Koenig, Walter's son. He declared:
... I had been awed and delighted by Josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is Josh: the sweetness of Josh, the intelligence of Josh, the questioning nature of Josh.
"The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" is a horror short story by Harlan Ellison. It was first published in the 1973 anthology Bad Moon Rising: An Anthology of Political Forebodings edited by Thomas M. Disch. It was also published in several other anthologies such as Deathbird Stories. It was inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese.
D. Harlan Wilson is an American novelist, short-story writer, critic, playwright and English professor. His body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction, with Wilson also being recognized as one of the co-founders of bizarro fiction." Among his books is the award-winning novel Dr. Identity, the two-volume short story collection Battle without Honor or Humanity, a monograph on John Carpenter’s They Live and a critical study of the life and work of J. G. Ballard.
Rogue was a Chicago-based, men's magazine published by William Hamling from 1956 until 1965. Founding editor Frank M. Robinson was followed by other editors, including Harlan Ellison and Bruce Elliott. The magazine was subtitled "Designed for Men."
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 ."
Web of the City is the first novel written by American author Harlan Ellison. The novel follows the story of Rusty Santoro, a teenage member of the fictional Cougars street gang in the 1950s Brooklyn, New York. In order to research the book, Ellison spent time in an actual street gang in Brooklyn. His book Memos from Purgatory (1961) is a non-fiction account of his time in the Barons.
Typewriter in the Sky is a science fantasy novel by American writer L. Ron Hubbard. The protagonist Mike de Wolf finds himself inside the story of his friend Horace Hackett's book. He must survive conflict on the high seas in the Caribbean during the 17th century, before eventually returning to his native New York City. Each time a significant event occurs to the protagonist in the story he hears the sounds of a typewriter in the sky. At the story's conclusion, de Wolf wonders if he is still a character in someone else's story. The work was first published in a two-part serial format in 1940 in Unknown Fantasy Fiction. It was twice published as a combined book with Hubbard's work Fear. In 1995 Bridge Publications re-released the work along with an audio edition.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Ex Machina is a 2014 science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Alex Garland in his directorial debut. A co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, it stars Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, and Oscar Isaac. It follows a programmer who is invited by his CEO to administer the Turing test to an intelligent humanoid robot.
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.
This is a list of works by Harlan Ellison (1934–2018). It includes his literary output, screenplays and teleplays, voiceover work, and other fields of endeavor.