Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Cynthia Felice

At five foot ten, with an added inch or two of curly hair, Cynthia Felice stands out in a crowd. Though Cynthia grew up in Chicago, she now lives in Colorado Springs, on a ridge with a view of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.

Cynthia has attended both Clarion and Milford workshops and co-founded the Colorado Springs Writers' Workshop with Ed Bryant. She has also served on the Nebula jury and lectured and taught at colleges, high schools, and workshops. She says that "as a writer . . . over the age of fifty with a library card, [I have] a lot to share with would-be writers and students."

More comfortable with a backpack than a purse, Cynthia's hobbies include mountaineering and hiking, even river rafting and horseback riding. She also enjoys gardening and reading. Known for her complex, carefully plotted novels, Cynthia's latest novel was Promised Land, co-authored with Connie Willis. She reports that she is working on a new novel.
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Darlene Marshall

Historical romance writer Darlene Marshall lives in Florida with her husband, a squirrel-hating dachshund, and a snake who had a cameo role in Smuggler's Bride. She's been a reporter and news director, drug abuse prevention specialist, and obituary writer, but claims romance novelist is the most difficult job. "I have to make everything up and have it make sense. News reporting didn't have to make sense, it just had to be accurate."

Darlene's first novel was published as an e-book in 2001 and she is now published in print and electronic form. Recently two of her novels won Eppies for Best Historical Romance in electronically published work. Her books are also available in German and Estonian. Writing about piracy, smuggling, and romance in old Florida is a great excuse for Darlene to abandon the office, put the convertible top down, and visit what she describes as "hotbeds of intrigue and romance" like Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Micanopy.

Her latest novel, The Bride and the Buccaneer, is awaiting sale, and she's working on a new romance called A Sea Change.
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Sam Scheiner

Sam Schiner is a long-time fan and scientist. His scientific areas of expertise are ecology and evolution, and he has published 6 books and over 60 scientific papers. He has also co-authored a book with SF author Phyllis Eisenstein on arthritis. For the past 10 years he has worked at the National Science Foundation giving away money.

He grew up in the Pittsburgh area and got involved in fandom during college; in Chicago during the school year while attending the University of Chicago, and in Pittsburgh during the summers. He eventually graduated the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in biology, and then went through the typical academic peregrinations - post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester and the University of Arizona, faculty at Northern Illinois University and Arizona State University.

Sam has been active in fandom since college. At UC he reincarnated the science fiction club. He met his wife at Windycon in Chicago, and his daughter attended her first con at the age of 4 weeks, sleeping underneath a huckster table. Currently he is involved in the Washington Science Fiction Association and chairing this year's convention - Capclave.

He can often be found on panels discussing science topics, or bringing science into the discussion of science fiction. To give you idea of what he thinks is a good time, Scheiner offered this up as a programming idea: "I am currently running an NSF program on infectious disease (bird flu, plague, etc). A panel on the next big epidemic is always fun."
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Robert J. Sawyer

Robert J. Sawyer is the author of 18 science-fiction novels and over 40 short stories. He won the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year (for Hominids, first volume of his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy) and has ten other Hugo nominations to his credit, including one this year for his novel Rollback.

Sawyer discovered SF during the Golden Age, which is to say, when he was 12: "The very first science-fiction book I ever read was Trouble on Titan by Alan E. Nourse, a beat-up hand-me-down Lancer paperback my older brother gave me when I was 11 or 12. That book began with an introduction by Nourse about the joys of writing SF. So, instead of the usual slow progression of first discovering SF, then realizing that someone must actually write these books, and at last it finally dawning on me that maybe I could try writing SF, too, from my first exposure to the genre, Nourse had invited me, and his other readers, to try their hands at writing the stuff. I've been hooked as reader, and as a writer, ever since."

His novels include Calculating God, Flashforward, Factoring Humanity, Starplex, Illegal Alien, Far-Seer, and Golden Fleece. They have been translated into Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish.

His most recent book is Identity Theft and Other Stories, with an introduction by Robert Charles Wilson. His next novel, Wake, first of his WWW trilogy about the World Wide Web gaining consciousness, will be serialized in Analog beginning this fall, with the hardcover following from Ace in April 2009.

Sawyer often gives futurism keynote addresses at business and technology conferences. He edits his own imprint—Robert J. Sawyer Books—for Calgary's Red Deer Press, and he has taught science-fiction writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, Humber College, and the Banff Centre. He recently wrote a guest editorial for the journal Science, has published in Sky & Telescope and Acrhaeology magazines, contributes to The New York Review of Science Fiction, and had a long-running how-to-write column in On Spec, Canada's leading SF magazine.

Robert J. Sawyer was born in Ottawa in 1960, and lives in Mississauga, Ontario, with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink.
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Stanley Schmidt

Stanley Schmidt was born in Cincinnati and graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1966. He began selling stories while a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, where he completed his Ph.D. in physics in 1969. He continued freelancing while an assistant professor at Heidelberg College in Ohio, teaching physics, astronomy, science fiction, and other oddities. (He was introduced to his wife, Joyce, by a serpent while teaching field biology in a place vaguely resembling that well-known garden.) He has contributed numerous stories and articles to original anthologies and magazines including Analog, Asimov's, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rigel, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, American Journal of Physics, Camping Journal, Writer's Digest, and The Writer. He has edited or co-edited about a dozen anthologies.

Since 1978, as editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, he has been nominated 29 times for the Hugo award for Best Professional Editor. He has served as editor of the magazine longer than anyone except John W. Campbell (whom he knew). He brings diverse experience to his work including being a linguist ("I have studied a dozen or so languages [including Swahili] and invented a couple of others.") and world traveler, having been to every continent except Antartica.

His most recent book is The Coming Convergence: Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future (Prometheus, 2008).
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Lawrence M. Schoen

Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen relishes the diversity of interests that come together at the Worldcon, no matter how bizarre or outré. He laughs as he explains, "Hey, I teach people to speak Klingon, I'm in no position to be throwing any stones."

Though born in Chicago, Schoen grew up in the endless sunshine of southern California. From age five until his eighteenth birthday, he worked every weekend with his father at various swap meets, selling everything from black Santa Claus dolls to melon ballers, aerosol bandages to women's underwear. This provided him the opportunity to watch the full range of humanity pass by (as well as sell the occasional melon baller), and probably marks the start of his interest in human behavior. His writing career also began at those swap meets, and when business was slow he filled spiral notebooks with endless tales for his own amusement.

After ten years as a professor of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, Schoen left academia to work in the private sector as a Research Director and Compliance Officer for a series of mental health and substance abuse facilities in Philadelphia, providing treatment for the poor and indigent. Said Schoen, "It's incredibly gratifying work."

In the midst of everything else, he also found time to return to his first love, crafting fiction, and has written five novels and published some 40 stories and poems. Last year's WorldCon found him a nominee for the prestigious Campbell Award. His fiction has appeared in variety of print and electronic magazines and anthologies, in English, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and, of course, Klingon. Last year Schoen embraced the additional task of becoming a publisher and started Paper Golem LLC, a speculative fiction press with a commitment to publishing newer authors and uncommon story lengths.

Among his best-loved characters are an itinerant stage hypnotist and his alien animal companion who can eat anything and farts oxygen. Fans of his work will be delighted to learn that SRM Publisher will be releasing Buffalogistics: Tales of the Amazing Conroy #3 at Denvention. You're invited to the launch party! And when you see him at the convention, be sure to ask him for a ribbon. Visit his website.
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Ken Scholes

Ken Scholes's quirky, speculative short fiction has been showing up over the last eight years in publications like Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld Magazine, Best New Fantasy 2, Polyphony 6, and L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXI.

Growing up in a rural logging town in Washington, Scholes started writing and submitting his stories at a young age. "I read Bradbury's essay 'How to Keep and Feed a Muse' when I was twelve or thirteen," Scholes says, "and I knew I had to be a writer." His high school English teacher took note and encouraged Ken, taking him to hear writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou when they passed through the area and sponsoring him for young author conferences and art camps.

His five book series, The Psalms of Isaak, is forthcoming from Tor Books with the first volume, Lamentation, debuting in February 2009 and the second volume, Canticle, following in October 2009. His first short story collection, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Journeys, is forthcoming from Fairwood Press in November 2008.

Scholes lives near Portland, Oregon, with his amazing wonder-wife Jen West Scholes, two suspicious-looking cats, and more books than you would ever want to help him move. He invites folks to look him up through his website.
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Lee Whiteside

Lee Whitside discovered organized fandom in the mid-1980's and has been involved with Arizona fandom ever since, working committee or staff at most of the LepreCons and CopperCons in the last 20 years, chairing two CopperCons (16 & 23), two LepreCons (28 & 36 in 2010), and the 2006 Nebula Awards Weekend. He also runs the official Connie Willis website.

He grew up in a small town in Kansas, getting his comics and science fiction novels primarily from the spinner racks in the grocery store run by his father. He graduated from the University of Kansas with an Electrical Engineering degree (where he did take an English elective class about science fiction that may have been taught by James Gunn) and moved to the warmer climate of Phoenix, Arizona, where he's evolved from an electrical engineer to a network engineer in his 25+ years there.

He's been keeping track of science fiction and fantasy TV in the online world since the early 1980's starting with the Magrathea BBS and now via his website SFTV.org. He was there at the dawn of Babylon 5, helping spread the word about the show with the Babylon 5 FAQL. He has also been writing about SF/F TV in ConNotations for over fifteen years. Said Whiteside, "I know a lot about Science Fiction Television, especially Babylon 5, most Star Trek, and Doctor Who and I'm up on most current shows in production." He is also knowledgeable about mainstream comics, with an emphasis on DC Comics, having read them on a regular basis since he was five years old.

Whiteside will be chairing the upcoming North American Discworld Convention in 2009.
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Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro spent his early youth in Spain (where he was born) and Germany, though not at the same time—simultaneity through quantum mechanics was a trick that would have to await his early twenties. His interest in How Things Work led him to a BSc in Theoretical Physics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) in Spain in 2003. His interest in How To Make Stuff Up led him to graduate from the Long Ridge Creative Writer's Group.

Alvaro has worked as a translator of technical documents and currently resides in Irvine, California, where he has a full-time job as a consultant for one of the major cell phone providers. An avid long-time reader and scribbler of science fiction, Alvaro made his first short fiction sale in 2008 and his reviews of speculative fiction and poetry appear regularly on The Fix review website.
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Brad Aiken

Brad Aiken and his wife and SF soul mate, Laura, live in Miami, Florida, where he is Medical Director for Rehabilitation at Baptist Hospital. Born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, then raised in Baltimore, Maryland, he was awarded the Navy Science Award, NASA Research Award, Army Science Award, and Air Force Physics Award for research in crystallography during his high school days. Their two children still shake their heads whenever they talk about their geeky SF-loving parents.

He began writing science fiction while attending Boston University, but put his literary interests on hold while earning an MD degree at the University of Maryland. He says that without the support of his wife he never would have been able to pursue his passion for writing. He published his first science fiction book, Starcsape: the Silver Bullet in 2000, followed by a second book in the series, The Starscape Project in 2004. His writing credits include numerous scientific articles and SF short stories, including the award winning "The Hill and Billy Dayton."

As a physician and science fiction writer, Aiken is particularly interested in how medicine and science fiction influence each other, and he has presented at medical conferences as well as SF cons on the subject. His current interests include brain neuroplasticity, medical robotics for the rehabilitation of patients with stroke and brain injury, and the nascent field of nanomedicine, which is about to revolutionize medical care more than any discovery in the history of mankind.

His latest book, the nanomedicine thriller Mind Fields, is a game of espionage where the winner gets to control your thoughts.
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