About the Author

ROBERT SHECKLEY has been producing acclaimed, innovative science fiction since the Golden Age of the 1950s -- mastering SF comedy a quarter century before Douglas Adams. In 2000 he received a special Author Emeritus Nebula Award for his contribution to the genre. His first novel, Immortality, Inc., was turned into the movie Freejack, and other stories formed the basis of the films The Tenth Victim and La Prix du Danger. Recent novels include Godshome and Dramocles. With Roger Zelazny, he wrote the skewed fantasy series Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, If at Faust You Don't Succeed, and A Farce to Be Reckoned With. Other accomplishments include several hundred short stories, two years as fiction editor for Omni Magazine, fifteen scripts for Captain Video in the '50s, the Deep Space Nine book The Laertian Gambit, and the novelization of Babylon 5: A Call To Arms. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, the writer Gail Dana.

URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN has written some of the definitive works of fantasy and science fiction genres. Between her Earthsea series, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, and her books of poetry, essays, realistic fiction, and short stories, she has consistently treated science fiction and fantasy as fields worthy of nothing less than art. She has received five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.