Emily Smith is a physician living in the Central Valley of California. She’s not afraid to put you to sleep but she is terrified of black widow spiders, heights, and that sudden silence that means a child is up to no good. She lives in constant danger of being eaten by cats, tripped by a baby, choked by a wisteria vine or smothered by wild birds. The wisteria vine is currently the most likely cause of her demise as it is the only thing not dependent on her for sustenance and her death dovetails nicely into its plan for world domination.

You can occasionally find her as Fireturtle on the Escape Artists forums, particularly if there is a flash contest in the offing.

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Smith’s first published story was “The Man Who Drew Cats”, which won the British Fantasy Award in 1991 for “Best Short Story”. He has been published in Postscripts. His first novel, Only Forward, was published in 1994 and won the August Derleth Award for Best Novel in 1995, and then the Philip K. Dick Award in 2000. The plot involves the lead character, Stark, having to find a missing man he believes to have been kidnapped, and travel through the strange zones of his city. In 1996 his second novel, Spares, was released, a novel in which the lead character, Jack, goes on the run with clones who are used for spare body parts for rich people, when he realises they are people with feelings. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks purchased the film rights for Spares, but a film was never made. When the rights lapsed, DreamWorks did produce The Island, whose plot had strong similarities to Spares, though Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities. He now considers it unlikely a Spares film will ever be made. (more…)

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Rashida J. Smith is a writer, and the editor of the webzine Giganotosaurus. She has been a carriage driver, a zookeeper’s assistant, riding instructor, and a yoga teacher.  Currently, she wrangles a small person, noodles around on the cello and makes photos.

Lots of folks call her Eddie.

It’s a LONG story.

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JAMES SMYTHE is the winner of the Wales Fiction Book of the Year 2013, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2014. He is the author of, amongst other things, The Machine, The Explorer, No Harm Can Come To A Good Man, and the Australia trilogy, a series for Young Adult readers. His most recent book released in the US is No Harm, and in October of this year, Way Down Dark will be published in the US by Quercus.

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Melissa Snark lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband, three children, and a glaring of litigious felines. She reads and writes fantasy and romance, and is published with The Wild Rose Press & Nordic Lights Press. She is a coffeeoholic, chocoholic, and a serious geek girl. Her Loki’s Wolves series stems from her fascination with wolves and mythology.

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Prolific writer Robert William Sneddon was born in Beith, Scotland, in 1880 and emigrated to the United States in 1910. Although he wrote three novels and several plays, it is for his more than three hundred short stories, many of which involve crime or horror, that he is remembered. He died in New York City on March 8, 1944.

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Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author. She wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, and the collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Scary Out There, Seize the Night, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction.

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Fyodor Sologub was a Russian poet, novelist, translator, and playwright, a pessimist with a morbid sense of humour (characteristic elements of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy), and a significant figure of the Symbolist movement. Sologub became in Russia one of the four best-known writers in his time with Andreyev, Kuprin, and Gorky. His reputation as an “archetypal decadent” stemmed from his early prose works, which are characterized by the blending of reality and fantasies, quietly demonic spirit, world-weariness, and existential despair. “It’s life that’s the dream / I relinquish the old lies / And the torturing of time.” Sologub’s child characters are often haunted by abnormal psychic experiences and a longing for death. He died in Leningrad on December 5, 1927. He was said never to have been seen laughing during the whole of his life.

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