The Fifth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®

Gardner Dozois has won fifteen Hugo Awards and twenty-eight Locus Awards as editor on the magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, and for the annual anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction. He has also won two Nebula Awards for his own writing and is the author or editor of over a hundred books.

Robert Sheckley lives in Portland, Oregon. He is one of the great living writers of SF and fantasy, and is well-known as an author of detective fiction. He is distinguished by a bright, witty, pyrotechnic prose style and a portrayal of humorous absurdities in his fiction. He has been writing since the 1950s, and is the author of more than forty books, many of which have been translated worldwide.

George Zebrowski is a science fiction author and editor who has written and edited a number of books, and is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Zebrowski received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits, and several of his short stories have been nominated for the Nebula Award. He lives with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he has co-written a number of novels, including Star Trek novels.

Keith Laumer (1925-1993) was an American science fiction writer and former diplomat whose real-world experience in international service informed many of his stories. Best known for the satirical Retief series and the influential Bolo tales of military science fiction, Laumer combined wit, action, and political insight. His work remains a defining presence in mid-twentieth-century speculative fiction.

Darrell Schweitzer (b. 1952) is an American writer, editor, and critic known for his work in fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He served for many years as an editor of Weird Tales, where he helped shape modern weird fiction and contributed to the revival of interest in classic authors of the genre. Schweitzer is also the author of numerous stories and essays, and has written extensively on the history and development of speculative fiction. He remains active as both a writer and commentator.

Grania Davis (1943-2017), an author and editor, wrote The Rainbow Annals, The Great Perpendicular Path, and Moonbird. She was married to author Avram Davidson from 1962 to 1964 and collaborated with him on several works. After Davidson's death in 1993, Davis coedited collections of his stories, including The Avram Davidson Treasury (with Robert Silverberg), which won the 1999 Locus Award for best collection.

Rick Raphael (1919-1994) was an American author and journalist who began publishing science fiction with "A Filbert is a Nut" for Astounding in November 1959 and established a considerable reputation in the field with a comparatively small output of about ten stories, most of them assembled in The Thirst Quenchers (coll 1965) and Code Three. The first contains four good stories, the best of which is the title story about professionals in a future where Earth's water is carefully rationed, their job being its proper allocation. Code Three describes, in three long episodes, the way of life of the police who patrol the superhighways of the future in enormously complex vehicles made to cope with the huge speeds and corresponding irresponsibility on the roads; it is one of the first science fiction genre tales to treat the burgeoning superhighway system in America as a subject worth focusing on. Raphael was at his best when describing, in positive terms, the life of those who must deal professionally with a technological world. The President Must Die (1981) is a Near Future thriller.

Cory Doctorow is co-editor of BoingBoing.net and the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He writes columns for Make, Information Week, the Guardian online and Locus. He has won the Locus Award for his fiction three times, been nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula, won the Campbell Award and was named one of the internet’s top 25 influencers by Forbes magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He hopes you’ll use technology to change the world.

<B>Donald E. Westlake</B> has written numerous novels over the past thirty-five years under his own name and pseudonyms, including Richard Stark. Many of his books have been made into movies, including <I>The Hunter</I>, which became the brilliant film noir <I>Point Blank</I>, and the 1999 smash hit <I>Payback</I>. He penned the Hollywood scripts for <I>The Stepfather</I> and <I>The Grifters</I>, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The winner of three Edgar awards and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Donald E. Westlake was presented with The Eye, the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, at the Shamus Awards. He lives with his wife, Abby Adams, in rural New York State. For more information, visit his website: www.donaldwestlake.com.

Carol Emshwiller grew up in Michigan and in France and for many years divided her time between New York and California. Her stories appeared in literary and science fiction magazines for over forty years and were published in a number of critically acclaimed collections including The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller and In the Time of War/Master of the Road to Nowhere. Emshwiller’s work has been honored with two Nebula Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two literary grants from New York State. She died in 2019.