Essentials

Samuel Ray ‘Chip’ Delany, Jr was born in Harlem in 1942, and published his first novel at the age of just 20. As author, critic and academic, his influence on the modern genre has been profound and he remains one of science fiction’s most important and discussed writers. He has won the Hugo Award twice […]

Lucius Taylor Shepard was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1947. He travelled extensively in his youth, and has held a wide assortment of occupations in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America, including rock musician and night club bouncer. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1980 and made his first commercial sale […]

Born in Wales in 1951, Christopher Evans won the BSFA award in 1993 for his novel Aztec Century. In the 1980’s, he co-edited three Other Edens anthologies with Robert Holdstock, and as well as the science fiction published under his own name, he is the author of a number of well received books for younger […]

We’s like to wish a Happy Birthday to the very talented Phillip Mann, who turns 75 today! Probably best known for his Land Fit for Heroes sequence, Phillip fell silent in the mid-90s, not publishing any new SF until 2013 when <ahem> Gollancz published his critically acclaimed The Disestablishment of Paradise, which was shortlisted for […]

Doris Piserchia was born in 1928, in Fairmont, West Virginia, where she grew up as part of a large family. She attended Fairmont State College and worked as a lifeguard while earning a teacher’s degree in Physical Education. Upon graduating in 1950, Piserchia realised that she didn’t want to become a teacher and so instead […]

Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since the age og nineteen, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a […]

Lawrence Watt-Evans is the working name of American science fiction and fantasy writer Lawrence Watt Evans. He was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on this day in 1954. He was the fourth of six children and studied at Bedford High School and Princeton University, although he left the latter without a degree. Watt-Evans began publishing SF […]

Lyon Sprague de Camp was born in 1907 and died in 2000. During a writing career that spanned seven decades, he wrote over a hundred books in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, non-fiction and biography. Although arguably best known for his continuation of Robert E. Howard‘s Conan stories, de Camp was an […]

Donald Moffitt was born in Boston on this day in 1931. A former public relations executive, industrial filmmaker, and ghostwriter, he wrote fiction on and off for more than twenty years under his own name and an assortment of pen names. His first full-length science fiction novel and the first book of any genre to […]

Marta Randall was born in 1948 in Mexico City, and moved to the USA as an infant. She  is the author of seven novels and numerous shorter works. She also edited New Dimensions 11 and 12 and Nebula Stories 19. She has taught writing in a number of venues, including the Clarion workshops and through […]

Born in County Durham in 1937, Brian Lumley joined the British Army’s Royal Military Police where he served in many of the Cold War hotspots, including Berlin and Cyprus in partition days. After reaching the rank of Sergeant Major, he retired to Devon to pursue his writing career full time, and was first published in […]

Henry Kuttner was born in Los Angeles, in 1915. As a young man he worked for the literary agency of his uncle, Laurence D’Orsay, before selling his first story, ‘The Graveyard Rats’, to Weird Tales in early 1936. In 1940, Kuttner married fellow writer C. L. Moore, whom he met through the ‘Lovecraft Circle’, a […]