Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Suanne Warr

Suanne Warr grew up in an alternate universe which runs parallel to this one but on a much slower timeline. She didn't get up to speed and attend a traditional school (the kind where one has to sit down and listen) until her teen years, and soon tired of it. After searching across the nation for a unversity which suited her, she finally completed a history degree through Independent Study (self-taught) classes taken from BYU. Along the way she dabbled in theatre, aquired a black belt, picked up her husband and welcomed her two kids. She also scaled the exterior of a building and worked in a lab dissecting fish eyes--no one quite knows why.

She has enjoyed writing and publishing short fiction while completing her degree, and has now launched into a novel set in an age of pirates, magic, black powder, and a half-human, half-Mer girl with a world to save. You can drop by her website to learn more. www.suannewarr.com.
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Tony Lewis

Tony Lewis has been active in SF fandom since 1957 when he joined the MIT Science Fiction Society. Over the years he's chaired three Boskones and the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention (Noreascon I).

He was one of the founders of NESFA and serve as Press Tsar. He's published about a dozen SF stories professionally. Over the years he's also earned a PhD in physics from MIT.

Said Lewis, "My interests range from running SF conventions to bibliographic control to Cordwainer Smith."
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Tore Andun Hoie

Tore Audun Hoie was born in Norway, but has also lived in Scotland, Denmark, USA and Switzerland (if three months counts as "lived"). He has degrees in Civil Engineering, Management and Computer Science. He received an unexpected national award last year, for a book on Computer Security. He’s also a squash player, computer gamer, gardener, with some political interests.

His only distinguishing feature in SF is attending twenty-two Worldcons. Another twenty-two are planned. And he’s looking for a coauthor for eCulture (including gaming). He has published six university level text books. He wrote a novel on the Russian mafia. “When I finally realized their power, I did not dare publish the book (Russia is our neighbor),” he says.

His latest publication is a White Paper to the Nordic Council July 2008. It compares management cultures in Japan, USA, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. He wrote the Norway part. Visit www.global-leadership.info, select Publications, and then Global Leadership Report 2008. Next year the book Nordic Management is planned. In 1987 all five Nordic countries were poorer than the USA; now all earn more. The book explains how this was possible, and outlines a new Theory of Management based on the results.
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William Dietz

William Dietz was born in Washington D.C. where his father was stationed at the end of WWII. His family moved to the Pacific Northwest shortly thereafter. Growing up in Seattle, Dietz, read three or four books a week, including every science fiction novel he could get his hands on.

After an epiphany in the Navy, he enrolled in University of Washington, making better grades than he did in high school, making good use of his second chance. Dietz graduated with a degree in communications and became a news writer, producer and public relations manager. During an early mid-life crisis he and his wife ran off to live in South Africa for a while and have traveled extensively since. Dietz has been to every continent except Antarctica. Oh, the stories he can tell.

Travel has been very important to his writing, both in the specific as when he recently set a Hitman scene in Sintra, Portugal, and in general, as when he took China's Boxer Rebellion and converted it into a science fiction scenario/setting in For More Than Glory. "I can't visit every location I write about of course--but I can try!"

Dietz endeavors to entertain and move his readers with novels like those he loves to read. He wanted to write books from a very early age, but being something of a slow starter, took forever to get going. Sometime after college he told himself that he would write his first novel by the time he was forty. When his 39th birthday rolled around, and he hadn't started yet, he determined to keep his personal promise. He sat down and wrote a space opera called War World featuring futuristic bounty hunter Sam McCade. Having read lots of ACE science fiction novels, he chose to send the manuscript to them. His first book sold the first time he sent it in! His editor, Ginjer Buchanan, still teases him about all of the errors in the manuscript. "I'm proud to say that now, more than twenty years later, I'm still writing for ACE/Berkley/Putnam/Penguin."

Dietz's most recent publication, a thriller called Snake Eye, came out a few months ago, and his next book, When Duty Calls, will come out in October of this year.
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Andrea Beth Novin. P.E.

Andrea was born July 5, 1949 in the Bronx,NY. earning an ASMME and graduating HS in 1967 [in that order]. She was appointed to the United States Naval Academy with the help of Senator Robert Kennedy, graduating in 1971 with a BSME. In the Navy, she learned to operate naval reactors, then worked on the USS Skipjack and USS Henry L. Stimson, as well as earning dolphins; at one time, she caused the shut down of Port Canaveral.

She left the Navy in 1976 and obtained her Professional Engineering License. She worked at Kodak on the backup Hubble mirror, 110 camera system, and the Kodacopier among other things (lots of other things!), then Firestone Tire & Rubber (though not on tires).

She has had her own shop, An Enginering Company, for many years in south Florida, doing a lot of contruction work including the IBM complex in Boca Raton (she viewed the shuttle Columbia disaster from the roof), until going to work for Broward County (Fort Lauderdale area), Florida, as a contruction engineer and as the County Environmental Engineer. (Her nickname there was "The Asbestos Lady.")

She retired on disablility after 17 years as the result of unwarranted side effects from a liver transplant but still does occasional work between battlefield visits, particularly with reenactments.

She is a life member US Naval Institute, and a member of the Civil War Preservation Trust and of the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society.

As she puts it, "Everything I have written has been of a technical nature and of no interest to you unless it was classified, in which case I can't tell you."

She says, "Never tell me 'But that's the way we always do it', unless you can tell me why as well."
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Carl Fink

Carl Fink has worked for conventions on and off since 1979, most recently the past 11 years for I-CON. Taking Heinlein's comment about specialization to heart, he has in his life worked on a loading dock, managed a store, been a schoolteacher, worked as a trainer for two large manufacturers, managed corporate Information Technology, and is currently a writer, appearing most frequently in Smart Computing magazine. After years as a sysop on GEnie's SFRTs, he returned to con-running at I-CON on Long Island, where he is now Director of Publications. His web site, nitpicking.com, takes on anything and everything worthy of criticism. A member of the Skeptics Society, Carl is particularly likely to challenge pseudoscience and superstition. He lives and works on Long Island, New York.
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Charles J. Walther, P.E.

Charles was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1951. He moved to Florida 1955, and attended elementary and high school in Hollywood, Florida. He went on to get a B.S. Degree in Chemistry from the University of Florida, and a B.S. Degree in Chemical Engineering, University of South Carolina. He is registered as a Professional Engineer in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.

He has been in charge of over 250 environmental cleanup projects in 12 states, designing unique remedial equipment and providing project management for sites throughout the southeast. He has managed environmental projects and programs in both public and private sectors since 1984. He is one of few knowledgeable in environmental forensics for determining the source, identity and age of petroleum hydrocarbon discharges. He is currently the Director of Environmental Engineering, Lee County Health Department. Although he has resided in many states, Mr. Walther has called South Florida home for over half a century.

Mr. Walther is the author of "Cooperation," a playable true-science-based, science fiction role-playing system available through Amazon.

Favorite quotes: "When they tell you it can't be done, that's when the fun starts."
"When talking to government officials, never confuse the issue with facts."
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David Summers

Author, editor and astronomer David Lee Summers lives somewhere between the western and final frontiers in Southern New Mexico with his wife Kumie and his daughters Myranda and Verity.

David edited the anthology Space Pirates for Flying Pen Press. He is the author of five novels: The Pirates of Sufiro, Children of the Old Stars, Heirs of the New Earth, Vampires of the Scarlet Order, and The Solar Sea. David is also co-author, with Lee Clark Zumpe, of the book, Blood Sampler, from Sam's Dot Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Realms of Fantasy, The Vampire's Crypt, Aoife's Kiss, The Fifth Di..., The Martian Wave, and Science Fiction Trails. He edits the science fiction and fantasy magazine, Tales of the Talisman and serves as a consultant for El Paso Community College's literary magazine, Chrysalis.

In addition to his work in the written word, David has also worked at numerous observatories around the southwestern United States.

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Diana Gill

Executive Editor Diana Gill runs Eos, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. She is the editor of New York Times bestseller Kim Harrison, and has worked with authors including Jonathan Barnes, Trudi Canavan, Vicki Pettersson, Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Mary Stewart, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Upcoming books include those by Richard Kadrey and Brom.
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Farah Mendlesohn

Farah Mendlesohn is a science fiction critic and an academic who teaches creative writing and media studies at Middlesex University, London. Although a meaningless title to Americans, she is very pleased to be the first "Reader in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature" in the UK, which (roughly speaking) means she gets paid to read what she loves. Despite this, her BA and PhD are in History (University of York) and her MA in Peace Studies (Bradford University). Her most recent books are Diana Wynne Jones, Rhetorics of Fantasy and the forthcoming The Inter-Galactic Playground on science fiction for children and young adults. In 2005 she won a Hugo with her co-editor, Edward James, for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
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