Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Joe Haldeman

Worldcon Guest of Honor in 1990, Joe Haldeman has had a long and distinguished career. He was born in Oklahoma and grew up in areas as diverse as Washington D. C., New Orleans, Puerto Rico and Alaska. He earned a B.S. degree in astronomy from the University of Maryland, and an M.F.A in Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

While having numerous short-term jobs in his lifetime, mostly teaching (he is an Adjunct Professor in the Writing department at MIT, teaching every fall), he considers himself primarily a writer.

Among his many awards, he has 5 Hugos, 5 Nebulas, the World Fantasy Award, and 3 Rhysling Awards, for novels, novellas, short stories and poetry. Forever Peace won the "triple crown" of science fiction (Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Awards) in 1998. His newer publications include Camouflage (2005) and The Accidental Time Machine, which was nominated for a Nebula in 2007.

In addition to writing, which he tries to do every day, he fits in pastimes of travel, cooking, astronomy, gambling, painting, playing the guitar, and snorkeling.
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Paul Knight

Paul Knight has been a practicing certified hypnotherapist for over 25 years. He had a practice in Denver through the 1980s then, for reasons that made sense at the time, moved to Milwaukee where he currently practices. In addition to his hypnotherapy practice, Mr. Knight performs comedy stage hypnosis shows throughout the United States and Canada, including several science fiction conventions.

He has been interested in hypnosis since he was a child. He began studying hypnosis back in the days before the Internet by reading books in his cave by firelight. After a brief stint as an accountant he decided he wanted more human contact and became a certified hypnotherapist. He was trained in hypnotherapy by Gil Boyne, one of the world's leading hypnotherapists and in stage hypnosis by Ormund McGill who is considered to be the finest stage hypnotist of the 20th century.

Paul has lectured extensively about all aspects of hypnosis to high schools, colleges, professional organizations and various other groups including the 1989 and 1991 WorldCons. In addition to being a certified hypnotherapist, he also has a Bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He has attended SF conventions for over 25 years. Said Knight, "I have been doing hypnosis panels and shows at various conventions for nearly that long. I am just returning from several years of gafiation. It is good to be back."
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Glenda Larke

Glenda Larke is an Australian who now lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where she works on the two great passions of her life: conserving tropical avifauna and writing books.

At various times in her life she has also lived in Austria, Tunisia and Borneo. She has taught English to students as diverse as Korean kindergarten kids and Tunisian engineering undergraduates. She has worked on conservation projects in peat-swamps, tropical islands, mangroves and montane cloud forest - and sometimes finds herself doing book copy edits on fishing boats, correcting first pages by lamplight in a tent in a tropical downpour, or meeting publisher's deadlines by plugging her laptop into the sole wall socket in a local coffee shop in a remote Malaysian village.

She has had seven fantasy novels published in Australia, USA and UK, with translations in French, German and Russian. She has been short-listed four times for the national Australian Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel of the year.

Ben Bova

Ben Bova is the author of more than 115 futuristic novels and nonfiction books about science and high technology.

In his various writings, Dr. Bova has predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, solar power satellites, the discovery of organic chemicals in interstellar space, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), the advent of international peacekeeping forces, the discovery of ice on the Moon, electronic book publishing, and zero-gravity sex.

Dr. Bova received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, "for fueling mankind's imagination regarding the wonders of outer space." His 2006 novel Titan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year.

Dr. Bova has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space age. President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science-fiction Writers of America, Dr. Bova was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the Arizona Astronomy Board. He is a columnist for the Naples Daily News and a widely-popular lecturer. Earlier in his career, he was an award-winning editor and an executive in the aerospace industry. He has worked with film makers and television producers such as Woody Allen, George Lucas, and Gene Roddenberry.

Mark Linneman

Mark Lenneman was born in Buffalo in 1950 and has both undergraduate and law degrees from SUNY/Buffalo. Later he earned a Master's degree from the University of Washington. He is a member of the Iowa Bar. Since 1976, he has been a law librarian at various law schools on two continents. Currently, he works as the State Law Librarian of California. He started to be involved "on the edges of fandom" in the mid-1960s.

Although he is an American, Mark is probably best known for involvement in Australian conventions and fandom. During the 1980s, he was a law librarian and on the law faculty at the University of Melbourne. He was in charge of the site selection for Aussiecon 3 in 1999, and he was co-head of programming for the 1985 Melbourne Worldcon. He is currently actively involved in the bidding for Melbourne in 2010. Mark has been on the Board of Victorian Science Conventions, the non-profit corporation that has run these Worldcons, for the last dozen years.

Mark's interests in Science Fiction focus on print rather than visual media.
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Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn survived her Air Force brat childhood and managed to put down roots in Colorado. She lives in Boulder with her dog, Lily, and too many hobbies. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, she's had short stories published in such magazines as Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales.

Most of her work over the last couple of years has gone into her series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. The most recent is Kitty and the Silver Bullet. She's also a contributor to the most recent volumes of the Wild Cards series. She says, "If this gig were easy everyone would be doing it." Visit her at website.
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Edward Willett

Edward Willett is a science and science fiction writer, actor, and singer from Regina, Saskatchewan. His more than 40 books include his most recent science fiction novel, Marseguro, published by DAW Books, and the upcoming sequel Terra Insegura. His first adult SF novel, Lost in Translation, was also published by DAW.

Willett has also written several young adult fantasy and SF books, and numerous titles on science and health topics for children; his 2003 book Ebola Virus, part of Enslow Publishers' "Diseases and People" series, was named one of the top K-12 science trade books in the United States by the National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council. Other recent non-fiction books include Genetics Demystified (McGraw-Hill), children's biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin (Enslow Publishers), and a history of engineering in Saskatchewan.

Born in New Mexico, Willett notes, "I moved to Saskatchewan from Texas when I was eight years old, giving me some insight into being an alien. Then I went to university in Arkansas, reinforcing the experience." Willett worked for several years as a reporter/photographer and then editor for the Weyburn Review. He then moved to Regina, where he served as communications officer for the Saskatchewan Science Centre during its early years, and researched and wrote most of the exhibit copy (something he continues to do on a freelance basis) before becoming a full-time freelancer in 1993.

Today, in addition to writing books, he writes a weekly science column for the Regina Leader Post and the Red Deer Advocate and is also a regular guest on CBC Saskatchewan's Afternoon Edition radio program. Willett maintains an extensive website, which includes a complete archive of his weekly science columns and blogs. He's the webmaster for SF Canada, Canada's association of professional SF, fantasy and horror writers, and is one of the bloggers for Futurismic
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David J. Williams

David J. Williams was born in England, grew up in the U.S., and is descended from Australian convicts. As to the obligatory list of jobs: he's worked at Toys R Us, sold snow cones and other tasty treats at the National Zoo, worked as a corporate mercenary (though not the exciting kind), and written video games--he has story concept credit on Vancouver, BC-based Relic Entertainment's HOMEWORLD, and was a writer on the imaginatively named sequel HOMEWORLD 2.

Williams debut novel, The Mirrored Heavens (Bantam Spectra, May 2008) is a 22nd century espionage thriller that has been described by Stephen Baxter as "Tom Clancy interfacing Bruce Sterling." Not to be outdone, Peter Watts, author of Hugo finalist Blindsight added that it "explodes out of the gate like a sonic boom and never stops. Adrenaline bleeds from Williams' fingers with every word he hammers into the keyboard."

He notes, " I was a professional speaker for several years, focused on corporate strategy and technology. Prior to that, I was under the illusion that I would do a PhD in history, though said illusion crumbled as the job market's cold wind blew in upon me. But I kinda feel I ended up in history anyway, albeit future history . . . "

The Mirrored Heavens.
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Nathaniel Williams

Nathaniel Williams works as the AboutSF Coordinator at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction in Lawrence, Kansas. He said, "I'm pleased to bring AboutSF's 'Teaching Science Fiction-A Portable Workshop' to Worldcon. Our workshop provides school teachers and librarians with a full day of training, including methods for teaching SF and developing curriculum. It's all in the name of AboutSF's goal to increase science fiction readership."

Williams teaches American literature, composition, and technical writing at the University of Kansas as a graduate assistant. He has made SF-related presentations at I-CON (SUNY-Stony Brook), the 2007 Nebula Awards Weekend, the Society for Utopian Studies, and the joint American Culture and Popular Culture Associations (ACA/PCA). In his own graduate work, he focuses on 19th century science fiction. He said, "I came to the university because of the CSSF. I knew I wanted to be involved in KU's long tradition of science fiction scholarship, and my position with AboutSF lets me share that interest with younger readers."

AboutSF's mission is to promote science fiction education at the primary, secondary and collegiate levels. This task includes collecting SF lesson plans from AboutSF's many generous volunteers and making them available online.
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Patricia Bray

Patricia Bray was born in a hospital and grew up in New England. After college, a job offer brought her to upstate New York, where she's remained due to the gravity field generated by her ever-expanding book collection.

She always knew that someday she'd be a writer, but studied computer science in order to pay the bills. When she turned thirty, she realized "If not now, when?" and wrote her first novel, a Regency romance. After publishing a half-dozen Regency romances, she made the leap to epic fantasy with her award-winning novel Devlin's Luck, the first volume in The Sword of Change series. Her newest title is The Final Sacrifice, which will be released in July 2008 by Bantam Spectra.

She continues to work as a Senior Systems Analyst, and wishes to categorically deny the rumors that the villains in her novels are modeled on former coworkers. Her current hobbies include cycling and asking friends to pose as corpses so she can hone her crime scene photography skills. You can find out what she's up to by visiting her website or checking out her LiveJournal.
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