Conflux Guests 2006
Honoured Guest
Sir Arthur C. Clarke - co-writer of 2OO1: A SPACE ODYSSEY
http://www.clarkefoundation.org | http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke
The world�s best known writer of science fiction, Sir Arthur C Clarke has published over 100 books, and hosted a large number of TV programmes. He was the first to propose the communications satellite in 1945, and one of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web. Sir Arthur has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.
Honoured Guest
Ray Bradbury - author of Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury was born in Illinois in 1920. One of the greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy in the world today, he has published some 500 short stories, novels, plays and poems since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old. His most famous works include Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.
Honoured Guest
Lloyd Alexander - author of The Chronicles of Prydain
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,0_1000000259,00.html
Lloyd Alexander is one of the most respected and best-loved of American authors, with a huge following worldwide. He is the author of the five-volume fantasy classic The Chronicles of Prydain, a series that has won many awards, including the prestigious Newbery Medal for The High King, the Newbery Honour for The Black Cauldron, and the ALA Notable Book for The Book of Three. He has written over forty books but is best known for his tales of high fantasy and adventure, and in 2003 he was awarded a Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention. Lloyd Alexander�s magical stories have been translated into thirteen languages and read by millions.
International Editor Guest of Honour
Ellen Datlow - co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
As fiction editor of Omni magazine, Omni Online, Event Horizon and most recently SCI FICTION, Ellen Datlow has encouraged and developed a generation of writers and published some of today's biggest names in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. The stunning assortment of writers Datlow has published includes such talents as William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Carroll, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub and Neil Gaiman, among many others. She has edited and co-edited a variety of anthologies and has been editing the horror half (with Terri Windling, and now Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant) of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for nineteen years. Datlow is currently tied for winning the most World Fantasy Awards in the organization's history (seven) and has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award, for her work as an editor. She is also a Consulting editor for Tor Books and lives in New York City.
Australian Guest of Honour
Kate Forsyth - bestselling author of the Witches of Eileanan
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~kforsyth
Kate Forsyth is the proud author of around dozen books, including a collection of poetry, two children's books, one serious literary attempt, and several big, fat fantasy series. Her books have been published in Australia, the US and Canada, the UK, Germany and Russia, and she has received fan-mail from Saudi Arabia, Korea, Finland and the Netherlands, where one fan is attempting to translate her books into Dutch. She writes articles for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Spectrum, Good Reading, The Age, Aurealis and Vogue. Her latest book Heart of Stars, the concluding volume in Rhiannon's Ride, is being released in June.
Special Guest
Sean Williams - author of over sixty published short stories and twenty novels
Sean Williams has been published around the world in numerous languages, on-line, and in spoken word editions. His work in the field of science fiction has been likened to that of the "Three Gregs" (Benford, Bear and Egan) while his fantasy has garnered comparisons to Peter Carey, Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin. His novel The Crooked Letter was the first fantasy novel in the history of Australian speculative fiction to win both Ditmar and Aurealis Awards.
Sean lives in Adelaide--a town once portrayed by Salman Rushdie as "an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel" and by Jules Verne as the prettiest city in Australia--where he is the current Chair of the SA Writers' Centre. He DJs and cooks curries less frequently than he used to but still likes mentioning them in his bio.
Invited Guest
Jackie French - bestselling author of over 100 books
Jackie French has a writing career that spans sixteen years, 42 wombats, 120 books for kids and adults, many genres, translations into 19 languages, and slightly more awards than she's had wombats, in Australia and overseas (that's overseas awards, not overseas wombats). An SF devotee, Cafe on Callisto (Aurealis award 2000), In the Blood (ACT Book of the Year) and Flesh and Blood (Aurealis shortlisting 2005) are science fiction and SF elements have snuck into many others. Recent books French has written include The Secret World of Wombats, How to Grow Your own Spaceship, Phredde and the Haunted Underpants, and Macbeth and Son.
International Comics Special Guest
Dan Abnett - comics creator of Sinister Dexter and prolific comic writer
Dan Abnett is one of the most prolific creators in comics today with an impressive body of work that includes the Pulp Fiction-esque gun totting bounty hunters Sinister Dexter, the future warfare of The VCs and Durham Red - all published in 2000AD. He has also written acclaimed stories for Black Library, which have sold more than half a million copies, and DC Comics including his collaboration with Andy Lanning on the Legion and Superman titles. Abnett started drawing comics at age 11 or 12 and after college started with Marvel UK. Freelancing subsidised his earnings, and after an Action Force strip he wrote on spec was accepted, scriptwriting became his second job on weekends and evenings. Eventually, Abnett quit his day job to focus on writing. He has written in the X-Men, Batman, Star Trek and Doctor Who comics universes and many more. Abnett believes he does his best work when under pressure � a possible reason that he has such a massive output.
International Gaming Special Guest
Steve Jackson - founder of Steve Jackson Games
The namesake, founder and editor-in-chief of Steve Jackson Games has been playing games for more than 30 years, and professionally designing them since 1976. Jackson's first professional design work was for Metagaming, but in 1980 he bought The Space Gamer magazine and struck out on his own. Success was immediate, with his Raid on Iran game. The next year, Steve Jackson Games released Car Wars, followed shortly by Illuminati, and later by GURPS, the "Generic Universal Roleplaying System�. In the 1980s, he tried his hand at interactive books or "game novels" (his Fighting Fantasy, Scorpion Swamp, spent six months on the British children's bestseller list), with others including Demons of the Deep and Robot Commando. In 1983 he became the youngest person to ever be elected to the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame. He has personally won ten Origins Awards, and several more have gone to the company at large.
His current big hit is Munchkin, a very silly card game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Current projects include a lot of Munchkin follow-ups and the online game UltraCorps.
International Gaming Special Guest
Andy Chambers - games designer for Games Workshop, Blizzard
Andy Chambers began working in gaming last century and has been making the galaxy a more dangerous place ever since. He started out writing articles for Games Workshop�s White Dwarf magazine, and went on to work on most of the company�s games: Adeptus Titanicus, Space Marine, Warhammer, two editions of Warhammer 40,000, Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Titan Legions, Battlefleet Gothic, and articles and supplements too numerous to mention. Still contributing to White Dwarf magazine in between projects Chambers also developed the bizarre mutant power of always defeating his old mentor Jervis Johnson in "Battle reports" regularly published in the magazine. Because no good deed goes unpunished he was then entrusted with running the Warhammer 40,000 games development team, recruiting and training a new generation of games developers to replace those now in cryo-tanks and adopting the suitably evil-overlord title of �40K Overfiend�. Since then he has founded Red Star Games, written a Black Library novel, produced the Starship Troopers miniatures game for Mongoose, developed miniatures rules for George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novel series for Testor Corporation, and is now working for Blizzard Entertainment in California.
International Special Guest
Joan D. Vinge - bestselling & Hugo Award winning author
http://www.sff.net/people/jdvinge
Joan D. Vinge, a science fiction fan since high school, has been writing professionally since 1973. Her first story, "Tin Soldier", appeared in the anthology Orbit 14 in 1974. Her story "Eyes of Amber", the cover story for Analog magazine's "All Women" Issue in June 1977, won the Hugo Award for Best SF Novelette. She has written several dozen stories; her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, Omni, SCI FICTION, Nature, and "Best SF of the Year" anthologies.
Vinge won the 1981 Hugo (Best Science Fiction Novel) and Locus (Best Novel) awards for The Snow Queen, which was also a finalist for the Nebula and the Ditmar awards. Her novel The Summer Queen (1993) was a finalist for the Hugo. Her children's book, The Return of the Jedi Storybook, was the #1 bestselling hardcover book of 1983 and the first such book to appear on the New York Times Book Review Bestseller List. She has written seven other original novels, including Psion (named a Best Book for Young Adults) and Catspaw, and film adaptations including novelizations of Ladyhawke, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Lost in Space. Her most recent novel is Tangled up in Blue.
Vinge enjoys reading manga or watching anime and writes the Manga and Anime column for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin Grant.
International Special Guest
James Frenkel - senior TOR editor & literary agent
James Frenkel has worked for Tor Books for twenty-two years, the last four years as a Senior Editor. In his long career he has edited a variety of fiction and non-fiction. At Dell Books he and Donald Bensen created Dell's science fiction and fantasy list. Frenkel also edited children's books for Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers, the "Binary Stars" series of double novels. He has edited film and TV tie-ins including books based on Terminator Three: Rise of the Machines, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and the new Battlestar Galactica (in progress).
James Frenkel founded Bluejay Books, a major trade publisher of science fiction and fantasy, including works by Greg Bear, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and many others. Since 1987 he has been the packager of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow. As an agent he represents the foreign and translation rights of authors such as Sara Douglass, Steven Brust, and Jo Walton. Books he has edited have won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Stoker.
Invited Comic Artist
Jason Paulos - comics creator of Hairbutt the Hippo
http://www.hairbuttthehippo.com
Jason Paulos debuted on the Sydney comics scene in 1989 with the first self published issue of 'Hairbutt The Hippo', the story of a hard boiled anthropomorphic private eye roaming the seedy underbelly of a future city. Over the years Paulos has regularly contributed to Australian MAD magazine and published over a dozen Hairbutt comics. He has also contributed to the DC comics 'Bizarro' project. 'Hairbutt The Hippo' books are available from www.lulu.com/ratrace.
Invited Manga Guest
Queenie Chan - manga creator for TOKYOPOP
Queenie Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1980 and migrated to Australia when she was six. She trained as an information systems analyst, but started drawing when she was 18 and decided to become a cartoonist instead. Much of her work began online but her big break came in 2004 when Los Angeles-based manga publishing company, TOKYOPOP, began accepting international artists. The first of her three book horror-drama series The Dreaming, was published by TOKYOPOP in December 2005.
Exhibiting Guest Artist
Nick Stathopoulos - Hugo Award, British SF Association Award and CHESLEY Award nominated illustrator
http://www.geocities.com/nickpaint
Nick Stathopoulos is one of Australia's most sought-after science fiction cover illustrators. His talents also include traditional and digital painting, storyboards and conceptual art, set painting, sculpting and scriptwriting. Working on film and television he has designed productions, art directed, painted cycloramas, drawn storyboards and built props. Stathopoulos has worked on commercials and video clips from Fleetwood Mac to Crowded House, and also as a background artist for Hanna Barbera and Disney Corp. His illustrations have graced the covers of books by Terry Dowling, Ian Irvine, Josephine Pennicott, Jack Dann, and young adult fiction writer John Marsden. Stathopoulos�s work has won a Penguin Television Award for Art Direction and eight Ditmars. In 2003 he was a finalist for the Archibald Art Prize for portraiture with his painting of Mr Squiggle and his creator, Norman Hetherington. In 1999 he was nominated for a Hugo Award for his professional science fiction art, and was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award for his cover of the anthology Dreaming Down Under.
Exhibiting Guest Artist
Greg Bridges - award winning science fiction illustrator of over 100 covers
Greg Bridges aims to make the impossible possible with his award winning science fiction and Fantasy art. In a career spanning more than 25 years, he has created more than100 covers for celebrated authors such as Sean Williams, James Alan Gardner, Kris Rusch, Karen Travis, Glenda Larke, Russell Kirkpatrick, Maxine McArthur, Simon Brown and Sara Douglass. Bridges has had works published in six countries and one of his illustrations is on permanent exhibition in Bon Contemporary Museum of German History. He has won Australian and international awards including the Best Professional Colour Art at the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon.
Exhibiting Guest Artist
Les Petersen - prolific and award winning science fiction cover illustrator
Les Petersen has worked as a freelance illustrator since 2001, creating about 50 covers for clients including HarperCollins Publishers, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and CSFG Publishing. Winner of the 2003 Ditmar Award for Best Fan Artist, Petersen has also been nominated numerous times for the Ditmar for Professional Artist. Among other prizes and awards, he was shortlisted for the 1998 George Turner Prize for his novel Supplejack. Petersen continues to write, and has worked in other creative roles such as cartoonist for The Canberra Times and a Design Consultant for New Parliament House in Canberra.