Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and a screenwriter. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens, Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed stage play at the Royal National Theatre in London.
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.
John Coulthart is a British graphic artist, illustrator, author and designer who has produced book covers and illustrations, CD covers and posters. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed Lovecraft-inspired book The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions which contains a collaboration with Alan Moore entitled The Great Old Ones that is unique to this book and also has an introduction by Alan Moore.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either skews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft. Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous. Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the label of New Weird, which continues into the 21st century.
Nemonymous was a short fiction publication that labeled itself a "megazanthus". It was published in the United Kingdom from 2001–2010, and edited by British writer D. F. Lewis.
Kirsten Jane Bishop is an Australian writer and artist. In 2004, her first book, The Etched City, was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She is a recipient of the Aurealis Award for best collection.
Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, and teacher currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. He has described his work as "de-genred" fiction.
The New Weird is a literary genre that emerged in the 1990s through early 2000s with characteristics of weird fiction and other speculative fiction subgenres. M. John Harrison is credited with creating the term "New Weird" in the introduction to The Tain in 2002. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be part of the horror or speculative fiction genres but who often cross genre boundaries. Notable authors include K. J. Bishop, Paul Di Filippo, M. John Harrison, Jeffrey Ford, Storm Constantine, China Miéville, Alastair Reynolds, Justina Robson, Steph Swainston, Mary Gentle, Michael Cisco, Jeff VanderMeer and Conrad Williams.
Jess Nevins is an American author and research librarian best known for annotated guides and encyclopedias covering Victoriana, comic books, genre fiction and pulp fiction. Among Nevin's books are Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana,Horror Fiction in the 20th Century and Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes. He has been a recipient and finalist for a number of honors, including the World Fantasy, Sidewise, and Locus Awards.
L. Timmel Duchamp is an American author of science fiction. She is also an editor for Aqueduct Press.
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is a collection of short stories and poetry by English author Neil Gaiman. It was published in the US and UK in 2006 by HarperCollins and Headline Review.
Ann VanderMeer is an American publisher and editor, and the second female editor of the horror magazine Weird Tales. She is the founder of Buzzcity Press.
MonkeyBrain Books is an independent American publishing house based in Austin, Texas, specialising in books comprising both new content and reprinting online, international, or out-of-print content, which show "an academic interest," but which "reach a popular audience as well."
Steampunk (2008) is an anthology of steampunk fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and published by Tachyon Publications. It was nominated in 2009 for a World Fantasy Award.
Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance is a collection of short fiction and shorter essays composed in appreciation of the science fiction and fantasy author Jack Vance, especially his Dying Earth series. Edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, it was published in 2009 by Subterranean Press.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an anthology of weird fiction edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
Diseases, both real and fictional, play a significant role in fiction, with certain diseases like Huntington's disease and tuberculosis appearing in many books and films. Pandemic plagues threatening all human life, such as The Andromeda Strain, are among the many fictional diseases described in literature and film.
”Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny” is a science fiction novelette by American writer Ted Chiang, initially published in the 2011 anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer. It also appeared in the 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.
