Maxima Library

Greg Egan’s last three stories for Asimov’s, “Cocoon” (May 1994); “Luminous” (September 1995); and “Tap” (November 1995), have all made the Hugo award’s final ballot. The paperback edition of Mr. Egan’s near-future novel, Distress, and the hard-cover edition of his far-future novel, Diaspora, have just been released by HarperPrism.

Eliot Fintushel lives alone in a working-class neighborhood north of San Francisco, “where my little daughter likes to visit and write and drum and paint goddesses between the rafters of the back porch.” Besides writing novels and short stories Mr. Fintushel is a performer and teacher of mask theater and mime.

Two-time Nebula-award-winning author Esther M. Friesner returns to our pages with a disquieting story about the terrors that lurk… in the realm of dragons.

Of her charming new tale the author says, “ ‘The Stubbornest Broad on Earth’ is the first story I’ve written that doesn’t include my mom as a character—that’s her mom and the farm she grew up on—and I think they’d both have liked it.”

Her editors certainly do.

Walter Jon Williams lives in rural New Mexico, a fact that “compels me to perpetual war with mosquito and tumbleweed, and to lengthy disquisitions on the merits and failings of my tractor, the name of which is Beam.” One of the author’s most recent short stories for Asimov’s, “Foreign Devils” (January 1996), won the 1996 Sidewise Alternate History Award for Best Short Form.