Robots through the Ages: A Science Fiction Anthology

Robert Silverberg is the winner of many Hugo and Nebula awards for his novels and short fiction. His work began appearing during the 1950s; he has received high acclaim for, among many others, such novels as Lord Valentine’s Castle (the first in the Majipoor series), Tower of Glass, Dying Inside, and Nightwings.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is the Hugo-nominated and #1 bestselling editor of twenty-two anthologies and numerous novels. His debut novel, The Worker Prince, received Honorable Mention on Barnes and Noble’s Year’s Best Science Fiction of 2011. He has written numerous short stories, including official entries for the Joe Ledger, Monster Hunter International, Predator, Aliens vs. Predators, and The X-Files series. His anthologies include the bestselling Monster Hunter Files with Larry Correia, two Joe Ledger anthologies with Jonathan Maberry, Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey with Jonathan Maberry, and more. He lives in Ottawa, Kansas, with his two dogs and three very naughty cats.

Seanan McGuire. Seanan lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, which she shares with her two cats, Lilly and Alice, a vast collection of plush things and horror movies, and sufficient books to officially qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life. She is a well known fixture of the fantasy community through her music and convention organization. She has 3 titles publishing in 2010.

Ambrose Bierce (1842–ca. 1914) was an American journalist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Ohio, he served in the Civil War and then settled in San Francisco. He wrote for Hearst’s Examiner, his wit and satire making him the literary dictator of the Pacific coast and strongly influencing many writers. He disappeared into war-torn Mexico in 1913.

Jack Williamson (1908–2006) published his first short story in 1928 and produced entertaining, thought-provoking science fiction from then on. The second person named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, he was always in the forefront of the field, being the first to write fiction about genetic engineering (he invented the term), antimatter, and other cutting-edge science. A Renaissance man, he was a master of fantasy and horror as well as science fiction.

During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time. Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was equally adept at writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His works were honored with the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He also received the Gandalf Grand Master Award for fantasy writing.

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Avram Davidson (1923–1993) was author of nineteen published novels and more than two hundred short stories and essays collected in more than a dozen books. Davidson won the Hugo Award in science fiction, the Queen’s Award and Edgar Award in the mystery genre, and the World Fantasy Award (three times).

Roger Zelazny is the author of The Chronicles of Amber series, Isle of the Dead, Eye of Cat, and coauthor of A Night in the Lonesome October.

Connie Willis is a science fiction writer and winner of eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards—more major science fiction awards than any other writer. She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009, and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011. She was presented with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2012 and has received a number of other awards, including an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2008. Her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book.

Brenda Cooper is the author of the Silver Ship series: The Silver Ship and the Sea, Reading the Wind, and Wings of Creation. She has also published many short stories, including a collaboration with Larry Niven, “Ice and Mirrors,” in Scatterbrain.

Suzanne Palmer is an award-winning and acclaimed writer of science fiction. In 2018, she won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Secret Life of Bots.” Her short fiction has won readers’ awards for Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and has been included in the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her work has also been featured in numerous anthologies, and she has twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and once for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Palmer has a Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where as a student she was president and head librarian of the UMass Science Fiction Society. She currently lives in western Massachusetts and is a Linux and database system administrator at Smith College. You can find her online at zanzjan.net and on Twitter at @zanzjan.

Ken Scholes is the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of five novels and over sixty short stories. His work has appeared in print since 2000. He is also a singer-songwriter who has written nearly a hundred songs over thirty years of performing. Occasionally, in his spare time, Ken consults individuals and organizations on maximizing their effectiveness.Ken’s eclectic background includes time spent as a label gun repairman, a sailor who never sailed, a soldier who commanded a desk, a fundamentalist preacher (he got better), a nonprofit executive and community organizer, and a government procurement analyst. He has a degree in history from Western Washington University. Ken is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Cornelius, Oregon, where he lives with his twin daughters. You can learn more about Ken by visiting www.KenScholes.com.

Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer and programmer. As a kid, he told stories to imaginary friends. He couldn’t imagine any career but writing fiction until his algebra teacher said, “This is a program. You should write one of these.” Fast-forward through thirty years of programming, writing, and teaching. He wrote, but he never submitted anything until his brother-in-law read a chapter and said, “That’s not a chapter. That’s a story. Send it in.” It was a runner-up for the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award and earned him a lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!Shoemaker hasn’t stopped writing since. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in The Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4. He received the Washington Science Fiction Association’s Small Press Award for his Clarkesworld story “Today I Am Paul,” which continues in Today I Am Carey, published in March 2019. Learn more at http://Shoemaker.Space.