David Hartwell

David G. Hartwell is a PhD in Comparative Medieval Literature who has been nominated for the Hugo Award thirty-seven times. Last year he won for the third time (Hugo as Best Editor) He has edited a number of anthologies, including an annual Year's Best SF paperback series now in its fifteenth year and co-edits a Year's Best Fantasy pb, not in its tenth year, both with Kathryn Cramer, and has won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. He has taught at Harvard University, Clarion West, and New York University, among others, and has edited a couple of thousand SF books since 1970. He is the author of Age of Wonders, the publisher of The New York Review of Science Fiction, and is presently a senior editor at Tor/Forge Books in New York.

Paul Levinson

Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009) have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, and the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into ten languages. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel), Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. Paul Levinson appears on 'The O'Reilly Factor' (Fox News), 'The CBS Evening News,' 'NewsHour with Jim Lehrer' (PBS), 'Nightline' (ABC), and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. His 1972 LP, Twice Upon a Rhyme, was re-issued on mini-CD by Big Pink Records in 2009, and will be re-issued in a vinyl re-pressing by Sound of Salvation/Whiplash Records in November 2010. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog, and was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education's 'Top 10 Academic Twitterers' in 2009.

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, 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 coedited about a dozen anthologies.

Since 1978, as editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, he has been nominated 31 times for the Hugo award for Best Professional Editor. He is or has been a member of the Board of Advisers for the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, and has been an invited speaker at national meetings of those organizations, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Association of Physics Teachers, as well as numerous museums and universities. In his writing and editing he draws on a varied background including extensive experience as a musician, photographer, traveler, naturalist, outdoorsman, pilot, and linguist. Most of these influences have left traces in his five novels and short fiction. His nonfiction includes the book Aliens and Alien Societies: A Writer's Guide to Creating Extraterrestrial Life-Forms, and The Coming Convergence: The Surprising Ways Diverse Technologies Interact to Shape Our World and Change the Future and hundreds of Analog editorials, some of them collected in Which Way to the Future?. He was Guest of Honor at BucConeer, the 1998 World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore, and has been a Nebula and Hugo award nominee for his fiction.