Maxima Library

The author resides in Pismo Beach, California, with a thoroughly unpleasant parrot. Of her debut tale in Asimov’s she says, “ ‘Noble Mold’ is the first published story in a series about the immortal agents of a twenty-fourth-century salvage company run by an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investment bankers. There really was a Fr. Rubio living at Santa Barbara Mission at the time this story covers, and his portrait can be seen at the museum there, smirking out at the visitors with an expression that implies that he knows more than he’s telling…

Just in time for spring training, two power hitters return to our pages. Ben Bova not only writes about the future, he has helped create it. The author of more than eighty-five futuristic novels and nonfiction books, he has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space program. President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of SFWA, Dr. Bova is a frequent commentator on radio and television, and a widely popular lecturer. He has also been an award-winning editor and an executive in the aerospace industry. Rick Wilber has sold about a hundred short stories and poems, and over one thousand nonfiction articles. He is the SF reviewer for the St. Petersburg Times, and he edits the Fiction Quarterly for the Tampa Tribune. Mr. Wilber is a faculty member of the School of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida. He is also administrator of the Isaac Asimov Award for excellence in undergraduate writing that is co-sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and by this magazine.

Stephen Dedman tells us, “I enjoy traveling, and have been mistaken for an Englishman, a Canadian, a German, an Italian, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a South African, a Bostonian, a Tasmanian, a criminal, and a waxwork. I live in Western Australia with my wife, a computer, too many cats, and too few books.” Mr. Dedman’s first novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, will be out in June from Tor Books.

Andy Duncan teaches freshman English at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he is working on a masters of fine arts. In 1995, he graduated from North Carolina State University in Raleigh with an MA from the creative writing department. Originally from Batesburg, South Carolina, Mr. Duncan also spent seven years as a newspaper reporter and editor in Greensboro, North Carolina. Although “Beluthahatchie” is his first fiction sale, he has since sold stories to Negative Capability and Starlight I. The author is currently at work on an alternate-history novel.

In a moment that many people can relate to, S.N. Dyer gives the high school in-crowd the scathing reward it so justly deserves…

In the future we may be able to erase the past but that won’t stop it from coming…

William Sanders, author of fifteen published books, is best known to science fiction fans for the alternate-history comedies Journey to Fusang and The Wild Blue and the Gray, and for his short stories based on Cherokee tradition. (Two of these stories have appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth editions of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.) In his first tale for Asimov’s, Mr. Sanders works both veins at once…

Our April 1995 novella from Brian Stableford, “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death,” was a finalist for the 1996 Nebula award. Mr. Stableford’s most recent American publication, The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, was released by Mark Ziesing Books last year. He is currently finishing Chimera’s Cradle, the final novel in a trilogy that includes Serpent’s Blood (Legend 1995), and Salamander’s Fire (May 1996). The author was also a leading contributor to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Orbit 1993) and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Fantasy.