Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher (born October 26, 1971) is a New York Times best selling author best known for his
contemporary fantasy book series The Dresden Files. He also wrote the Codex Alera series.
Butcher was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1971. He is the youngest of three children, having two older
sisters. He lives in Independence, MO, and has one son.
While he was sick with strep throat as a child, Butcher's sisters introduced him to The Lord of the Rings and The
Han Solo Adventures novels to pass the time, thus beginning his fascination with fantasy and science fiction. As
a teenager, he completed his first novel and set out to become a writer. After many unsuccessful attempts to
enter the traditional fantasy genre (he cites J. R. R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, and C.S. Lewis, among others, as
major influences), he wrote the first book in The Dresden Filesabout a professional wizard, named Harry
Dresden, in modern-day Chicagoas an exercise for a writing course in 1996 at the age of 25.
For two years, Butcher floated his manuscript among various publishers before hitting the convention circuit to
make contacts in the industry. After meeting Butcher in person, Ricia Mainhardt, the agent who
discovered Laurell K. Hamilton, agreed to represent him, which kick-started his writing career. However,
Butcher and Mainhardt have since parted ways; Jennifer Jackson is his current agent. Butcher has written two
series: The Dresden Files and Codex Alera. Codex Alera has ended after six novels and The Dresden Files are
still ongoing; he has also written a Spider-Man novel, entitled The Darkest Hours, released on June 27, 2006. In
addition, he contributed a short story for publication in My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding with Charlaine
Harris and Sherrilyn Kenyon, among others, released in October 2006. He has since contributed to the
anthologies Many Bloody Returns in September 2007 and My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon in December
2007. In October 2008, he released another short story in Blood Lite and a novelette, Backup, illustrated
by Mike Mignola.

Octavia Estelle Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A
multiple-recipient of both theHugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In
1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship which is nicknamed the
"Genius Grant". Butler's first work published was "Crossover" in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She
also sold the short story "Childfinder to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I
thought I was on my way as a writer, Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other
Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another
word." Starting in 1974, Butler worked on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist
series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Patternists, humans
who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the Patternmaster via a psionic chain;
their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal-like superhumans; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded
to the Patternists. The first novel, Patternmaster (1976), eventually was to become the last installment in the
series' internal chronology. Set in the distant future, it tells of the coming-of-age of Teray, a young Patternist
who fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster. Next came Mind
of My Mind (1977), a prequel to Patternmaster set in the twentieth century. The story follows the development
of Mary, the creator of the psionic chain and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, and her inevitable
struggle for power with her father Doro, a parapsychological vampire who seeks to retain control over the
psionic children he has bred over the centuries. The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978.
The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have
travelled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the
Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the
Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation to a rival tribe opposing the Tehkohn. After Survivor, Butler took a
break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979) as well as
the short story Near of Kin (1979). In Kindred, Dana, an African American woman, is transported from 1976
Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and
Alice, a black freewoman forced into slavery later in life. In Near of Kin the protagonist discovers a taboo
relationship in her family as she goes through her mothers things after her death. In 1980, Butler published the
fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series origin story. Set in Africa and
America during the seventeenth century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old
parapsychological vampire Doro and his wild child and bride, the three-hundred-year-old shapeshifter and
healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of
his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doros.

Ray Buttigieg
Ray Buttigieg (born May 1, 1955 in Gozo, Malta) is a poet and musician.
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He attended Qala primary school, then the Lyceum in Victoria, Gozo. He then moved to the United States and
continued his studies inNew York, where he settled permanently. By the age of 20 he had several poems
published in anthologies in London and New York City.
Best known for Pastorale (1978), Poeticus I & II (1986) and (1992), and the very first book he ever wrote in his
late teens Wizard's Spider Mystic Glider (1989) which are written in a classical style; he received criticism when
he later introduced a more modern style in his experiments and improvisational poetry. In the last few years he
returned to his earlier style in works like The Wisdom of Stones (2002), Remnants from the Book of Time (2002),
and The Procession (1999). Although for the last 25 years Buttigieg has been writing only in English and very
little in his native Maltese, his subject matter still includes a great deal of influence from his native Malta.
Buttigieg embarked on a solo career ever since he set eyes on his first keyboards, a Mellotron. He was involved
in multiple projects at the same time while being involved in solo major works and other series concepts
like Earth noise and Sound Science Series in the 70's and The Symphonic Poems, Music for and Diary of an
Earthling series in the 80's. Film and Video work were also becoming a very interesting avenue to combine
visuals, poetry and as the music soundtrack that would define the visuals all done under the same roof. He
continued his career by producing some influential and lush albums like Sound of Transformation - Symphonic
Poem No.1 (1982), Quantum Mechanics (1985), Music for Movies (1986), Codes (1987) and Musical Instincts
of Nature.

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE (born 24 August 1936) known as A. S. Byatt is an English novelist, poet
and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers
since 1945. The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The
Shadow of the Sun, was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967) charts the dynamics between two
sisters, and the family theme is continued in her quartet The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still
Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), Still Life winning the PEN/Macmillan Silver
Pen Award in 1989. Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women
in Love. Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual
studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then
tracing her journey as a divorce with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt says some of the
characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity I had this image of coming
out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women
of my generation." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of
the 1960s. She has written critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence
on her own writing. In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes
from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an escape
from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption
of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write
books are destroyers." Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics
with the past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Man Booker
Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia, included in Angels and
Insects (1992), was turned into the successful film with this same title (1995), nominated for an Academy
Award. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize. Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George
Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism andnaturalism with
fantasy. The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse, each the
tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives. Her books
reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology, and Darwinismamong other repeated themes.
Byatt has written for media including the British journal Prospect, The Guardian, The Times and The Times
Literary Supplement.[6] She has been a judge on many literary award panels including the Hawthornden Prize,
the Booker, David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Betty Trask Award.

John Lindley Byrne

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John Lindley Byrne (born July 6, 1950) is a British-born American comic-book writer and artist. Since the
mid-1970s, Byrne has worked on many major American superheroes. Byrne's better-known work has been
on Marvel Comics X-Men and Fantastic Four and the 1986 relaunch of DC Comics Superman franchise, the
first issue of which featured comics' first variant cover. Coming into the comics profession exclusively as a
penciler, Byrne began co-plotting the X-Men comics during his tenure on them, and launched his writing career
in earnest with Fantastic Four (where he started inking his own pencils). During the 1990s he produced a
number of creator-owned works, including Next Men and Danger Unlimited. He scripted the first issues of Mike
Mignola's Hellboyseries and produced a number of Star Trek comics for IDW Publishing. Byrne was born
in West Bromwich, West Midlands, England where along with his parents (Frank and Nelsie) he lived with his
maternal grandmother. While living there, prior to his family emigrating to Canada when Byrne was 8, he was
first exposed to comics, saying in 2005, He created the superhero parody Gay Guy for the college newspaper,
which poked fun at the campus stereotype of homosexuality among art students. Gay Guy is notable for
featuring a prototype of the Alpha Flight character Snowbird. While there, he published his first comic
book, ACA Comix #1, featuring "The Deaths Head Knight". Byrne left the college in 1973 without graduating.
He broke into comics with a "Fan Art Gallery" piece in Marvel's promotional publication FOOM in early
1974[7] and by illustrating a two-page story by writer Al Hewetson in Skywald Publications black-andwhite horror magazine Nightmare #20 (Aug. 1974). He then began freelancing for Charlton Comics, making his
color-comics debut with the E-Man backup feature Rog-2000, starring a robot character hed created in the
mid-1970s that colleagues Roger Stern and Bob Laytonnamed and began using for spot illustrations in
their fanzine CPL (Contemporary Pictorial Literature). A Rog-2000 story written by Stern, with art by Byrne
and Layton, had gotten the attention of Charlton Comics editor Nicola Cuti, who extended Byrne an invitation.
Written by Cuti, "Rog-2000" became one of several alternating backup features in the Charlton
Comics superhero series E-Man, starting with the eight-page "That Was No Lady" in issue #6 (Jan. 1975).
While that was Byrne's first published color-comics work, "My first professional comic book sale was to
Marvel, a short story called Dark Asylum' ... which languished in a flat file somewhere until it was used as filler
in Giant-Size Dracula #5 [(June 1975)], long after the first Rog story." The story was plotted by Tony
Isabella and written by David Anthony Kraft.
After the R0g-2000 story, Byrne went on to work on the Charlton books Wheelie and the Chopper
Bunch, Space: 1999, and Emergency!, and co-created with writer Joe Gill thepost-apocalyptic science-fiction
series Doomsday + 1. Byrne additionally drew a cover for the supernatural anthology The Many Ghosts of
Doctor Graves #54 (Dec. 1975).

Jules Gabriel Verne

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Jules Gabriel Verne (8 February 1828 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best
known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
Verne was born to bourgeois parents in the seaport of Nantes, where he was trained to follow in his father's
footsteps as a lawyer, but quit the profession early in life to write for magazines and the stage. His collaboration
with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a widely popular series
of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide
influence on the literaryavant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone
regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the
highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted.
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between the Englishlanguage writers Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare; he probably was the most-translated during the
1960s and 1970s. In English he is one so-called father of science fiction, a title also given to H. G.
Wells and Hugo Gernsback.

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