Robots through the Ages: A Science Fiction Anthology

Robert Silverberg, five-time winner of both the Nebula Award and Hugo Award, received the Grand Master Award for career achievement from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Bryan Thomas Schmidt is an author and Hugo-nominated editor of adult and children’s speculative fiction. His short stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and online and include stories in The X-Files and Predator series.

Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye and the InCryptid urban fantasy series. She also writes under the name Mira Grant. She is the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013, she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. Seanan lives in California.

Ambrose Bierce was born on June 24, 1842, in Meigs County, Ohio, son of Marcus Aurelius and Laura Sherwood Bierce, and the youngest of a large brood of children. He left his family in 1857 to live in Indiana, working for an abolitionist newspaper. He eventually came to live with his uncle Lucius Verus in Ohio, then attended the Kentucky Military Institute for a year before dropping out. Bierce worked odd jobs until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860, when he enlisted with the Ninth Indiana volunteers. Bierce worked primarily as a topographical engineer, where his excellent and valiant performance allowed him to rise through the ranks. What he saw and experienced in the war had the most profound effect on Bierce. His wartime experiences are commonly seen as the source of his cynical realism. Bierce moved to San Francisco in 1867, where he got a job working at the mint. It was then he decided on a career in journalism. Self-taught, he got a regular job as the "Town Crier" in the San Francisco News Letter at the end of the following year. Bierce's acid wit quickly gained him great local fame and a burgeoning national notoriety. In 1871, he courted and wed Mary Ellen Day, a San Franciscan socialite of one of the best families of the city. A wedding gift took them to England, where Bierce would spend one of the happiest periods of his life. During his time there, Mollie gave birth to his first two children, and he wrote his first three books: Nuggets and Dust, The Fiend's Delight, and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull. In early 1875, Mollie returned to San Francisco with their young family. Bierce reluctantly followed later that year, just before the birth of the couple's third child. In 1877, Bierce became the editor of The Argonaut, gaining notoriety for his "Prattle" column. After a brief period, Bierce returned to San Francisco and joined the Wasp in 1881, where he picked up his "Prattle" column. In 1887, Bierce began his famous (and tumultuous) relationship with publishing baron William Randolph Hearst, joining the staff of the San Francisco Examiner. While continuing his newspaper work, Bierce began producing books in America. Between 1891 and 1893, Bierce wrote and published The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Black Beetles in Amber, and Can Such Things Be? Bierce published Fantastic Fables in 1899 and Shapes of Clay in 1903. After Mollie's death in 1905, Bierce began working for Hearst's Cosmopolitan, and Bierce's Cynic's Work Book (later the Devil's Dictionary) was published in 1906. Bierce became less and less involved in the world around him. When Walter Neal approached Bierce to compile his Collected Works in 1909, Bierce resigned to Hearst for the last time. That year, he also published The Shadow on the Dial and Write It Right, all while working on the Collected Works. The last volumes of the twelve-volume Collected Works set appeared in 1912. In December 1913, Bierce crossed the border into revolutionary Mexico, possibly to meet up with rebel leader Pancho Villa, and was never heard from again. His death is generally agreed to have occurred in 1914.

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.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) wrote more than 100 short stories and dozens of novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was the basis of the classic film Blade Runner. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963 for his novel The Man in The High Castle. The Philip K. Dick Award is given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction.

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 (1937–1995) was the author of the Chronicles of Amber novels, as well as numerous other classic science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories over a three-decade career. He won the Nebula Award three times and the Hugo Award six times.

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 multiple novels and short stories. His work has appeared in print since 2000 and includes the Psalms of Isaak series (Lamentation, Canticle, Antiphon) and the Tor.com short story "If Dragon's Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear." 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, a musician 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 Hillsboro, Oregon, where he lives with his twin daughters.

Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer and programmer who, as a kid, told stories to imaginary friends. 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 has written ever since. He is the author of The Last Dance in the Near-Earth Mysteries series, and numerous short stories and novellas, including Murder on the Aldrin Express, which 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. Learn more at www.Shoemaker.Space.

If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness... qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.

Matt Godfrey was raised in the Deep South on O’Connor, Welty, and Lee, and spent most of his teenage years in Yoknapatawpha County. But the books took him places, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, Bradbury to Murakami. After nine years as a working film and TV actor, he found his true passion in audiobooks. He is a winner of the Audiofile Earphones Award and a multiple-time nominee for the Society of Voice Arts & Sciences Awards and the Independent Audiobook Awards.

Leonard Simon Nimoy (1931–2015) was an American actor, film director, poet, musician, and photographer. His most famous role was that of Spock in the original Star Trek series, as well as in multiple film, television, and video game sequels. He began his career in his early twenties, teaching acting classes in Hollywood and making minor film and television appearances through the 1950s, as well as playing the title role in Kid Monk Baroni. He made his first appearance in the rejected Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” in 1965 and went on to play Spock until 1969. Spock had a significant cultural impact and garnered Nimoy three Emmy Award nominations. TV Guide named Spock one of the fifty greatest television characters.

Noah Michael Levine has been acting, performing, and narrating for over forty years. With over 350 titles recorded, he truly loves bringing voice and character to books.

Jesse Vilinsky is an accomplished voice actor and improviser. She received her bachelor’s degree in theatre from the University of Southern California and trained and performed with the prestigious British American Drama Academy in London. An alumnus of The Second City Training Center in Hollywood, she co-wrote and performed in two acclaimed original sketch comedy shows there. She has lent her voice to numerous projects, and she relishes any opportunity to breathe life into a character.

Jim Meskimen is an audiobook narrator and a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows.

Steven Jay Cohen has been telling stories his whole life, and has worked professionally as a storyteller since 1991. A classically trained actor, he has worked both on stage and behind the microphone for most of his career. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Steven now resides in scenic western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, kids, and too many pets to mention.

John Pirhalla is award-winning audiobook narrator who has recorded over 300 titles. An Audie and Independent Audiobook Awards finalist, he has won a Reader's Favorite Award, an Adrenaline Award, a OneVoice Award, and an Indie Ink Award. Whether it's science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, or thrillers, he enjoys narrating books with lots of characters, voices, and accents.

Peter Ganim is an American actor of stage, television and film. And he does voiceovers. A lot of them. He began in front of the microphone in 1994, with corporate and incentive travel narration. In 2005, he hung out the shingle at PGVS, focusing on commercials for radio and television as well as audiobooks. He is accredited and certified by a number of organizations with cool acronyms, like AFTRA, SAG, the APA and SaVoa.

Tim Campbell, winner of AudioFile Earphones Awards, is a narrator and actor based in Los Angeles, California. He is also a classically trained singer and performs regularly with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Opera Chorus, as well as on studio soundtracks for film and television.

Bronson Pinchot, an Audie Award–winning narrator and Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, received his education at Yale University. He restores Greek Revival buildings and appears in television, film, and on stage whenever the pilasters and entablatures overwhelm him.

James Anderson Foster was born and raised on the west coast, and even though he's lived in the Midwest for over a decade now, still considers Oregon home. Nominated for three Voice Arts Awards in 2015 for best audiobook narration in the science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery categories, James has been praised for his conversational delivery and ability to sound exactly like the voice you were imagining in your head.

Neil Hellegers is a narrator, actor, and educator who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and mutt. His voice work can be heard in various commercials, video games, and numerous audiobooks.

Scott Aiello has narrated over a dozen audiobooks and is a 2013 Audie Award finalist for his nonfiction narration of Sex and God at Yale by author Nathan Harden. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School drama division and has since performed and directed various New York plays and has been seen on television shows such as Person of Interest and Elementary. Before Juilliard, he was a regular in the Chicago theater circuit.

Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. Stefan’s early singing career included choral and solo concerts at Carnegie Hall, Judson Hall, and Lincoln Center.

Dan Bittner is an actor and voice artist. He has appeared in The Wolf of Wall Street and Adventureland. His audiobook narration credits include the Relic Master series by Catherine Fisher and Stolen by Melissa de la Cruz.