Sophie Aldred
Sophie Aldred was born in Greenwich, England and brought up in Blackhealth, South East London. After leaving school, she attended Manchester University, where she took a degree in drama. From university she sang in working men's clubs to obtain her Equity Card, then worked in a children's theatre, appearing in a fringe show, "Underground Men," at a pub theatre in London to get an agent, followed by more children theatre. She was appearing in "Fiddler on the Roof" with Topol in Manchester when she landed the part of Ace in "Doctor Who," the Companion to Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. At the same time as appearing in "Doctor Who," she presented a series for young children called "Corners" and later "Melvin and Maureen's Music-a-grams," which combined her acting and music skills. She has appeared in a number of theatre productions including a tour of "Daisy Pulls it Off" in which she played the lead, and she played Marjorie Pinchwite in the 1993 West End production of "Lust," a version of "The Country Wife." In 1995 she worked for the Children's Channel on satellite and also Love Call Live for Anglia television with David 'Kid' Jensen. In 1996, she co-authored with effects designer Mike Tucker a book looking at her time in Doctor Who called "Ace!" More recently, she worked on the BBC series "Shadow Play."
Sophie is also the voice of Dennis the Menace (UK Dennis, not US one), Lindy (a little fairy mechanic, loosly based on Ace) in the iconic children's show, Noddy, and now cast as Muck (an orange dumper truck) in Bob the Builder for (wait for it) US tv!! (check out my dodgy US accent on PBS in January or so!!)
Bio courtesy of IMDB, with additional material by Jon Manzo and Sophie Aldred.
Policy regarding Autographs from Sophie Aldred
There will be a charge for any autographs from Sophie Aldred during MadCon 2010.
A Wide selection of photographs will be available for sale during Ms. Aldred's autograph
sessions; the charge for these photographs will be $25.00, which will include Sophie's
autograph at no additional charge. If you want to bring your own item(s) to be autographed,
the charge will be $20.00 per autograph.
Additionally, there will be a photograph session with Sophie on Saturday afternoon, where
we will have a professional photographer. For $25.00, you can have your photograph taken
with Sophie by our photographer, which we will have printed up and available by Saturday
evening. If you bring that photograph to Sophie's autograph session on Sunday, she will
autograph it at no additional charge. If you wish to have a photograph taken with your own
camera at that session, there will be a $10.00 charge.
SPECIAL ARTIST GUEST -- PERI CHARLIFU (BIO TO FOLLOW)
Lisa Snellings Bio:
Lisa Snellings charms viewers with deceptively whimsical images, then draws them deeply into the darker layers that imbue her work. Typically her art blurs the boundaries between dimensions and genres, mixing sculpture, painting, photography and words. The art she creates tends to inspire authors to write stories. Currently she is working with DreamHaven Books on a "Strange" anthology project including stories by Gene Wolfe, Peter S. Beagle, Larry Niven and Neil Gaiman. A permanent installation of "Dark Caravan", her collection of kinetic carnival works, will open in November of this year at the Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Her "Poppets" are sought out and collected all over the world. Lisa sculpts, paints, writes and lives in the Southern California Desert. Lisa is a fierce autodidact. She shares her creative process and her studio experience with followers of her blog, calling herself 'one idiot artist stumbling toward the light.'
Lisa's website: www.poppetplanet.com
Pat Rothfuss:
Patrick Rothfuss sprung fully formed from Marge Rothfuss, his mother, in Madison Wisconsin. In a mere three months,
Pat grew to the height of a man while teaching himself to read and write using only a shovel and a dead cat.
When the voices told him to, Pat left home to attend college in at University Wisconsin Stevens Point where he joined
Slytherin house and had many wonderful adventures. After graduating, Pat evolved into a being of pure light and energy.
Then he went to grad school and evolved even further into being composed entirely of bile, anger, binder twine, and sweet,
sweet, methadone. After grad school Pat joined forces with five plucky Japanese schoolgirls to form a giant robot that fights crime.
Through all of this Pat has read fantasy, watched fantasy, and written fantasy. Some academics have suggested that Pat eats,
sleeps, and breathes fantasy, but this is simply untrue. The truth is that Pat eats burritos, sleeps like a drooly baby, and
breathes a white-hot plasma composed of molten gold and rage.
Allen Steele
Allen Steele has been a full-time science fiction writer since 1988, when his first short story, “Live From The Mars Hotel”, was published in Asimov’s. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, but has lived most of his adult life in New England. He received his B.A. in Communications from New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire, and his M.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Before turning to SF, he worked as a staff writer for daily and weekly papers in Tennessee, Missouri, and Massachusetts, freelanced for various business and general-interest magazines, and spent a short tenure in Washington D.C., covering Capitol Hill as a stringer for papers in Vermont and Missouri.
His novels include Orbital Decay, Clarke County, Space, Lunar Descent, Labyrinth of Night, The Jericho Iteration, The Tranquility Alternative, A King of Infinite Space, Oceanspace, and Chronospace. During the last decade, he has devoted most of his attention to the Coyote series – Coyote, Coyote Rising, Coyote Frontier, Coyote Horizon and Coyote Destiny – along with three spin-off novels set in the same universe: Spindrift, Galaxy Blues, and the forthcoming Hex. His official website is www.allensteele.com and the Coyote fan site is www.coyoteseries.com
Steele has published over 75 stories, principally in Asimov’s, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and Omni, as well as in dozens of anthologies and small-press publications. His short fiction has been reprinted in five collections: Rude Astronauts, All-American Alien Boy, Sex and Violence in Zero-G, American Beauty, and The Last Science Fiction Writer. He has also written reviews and essays for a number of publications, including The New York Review of Science Fiction, Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, and SF Age, and he is a former columnist for Absolute Magnitude and Artemis.
His work has received two Hugo Awards (both for Best Novella), two Locus Awards (for Best First Novel and Best Novella), four Asimov’s Readers Awards (three for Best Novella, one for Best Novelette), an Anlab Award (for Best Novelette), a Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award (for Best Novella), a Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award (for Best Novella), and a Seiun Award (for Best Foreign Short Story). His stories have also earned four Hugo nominations, three Nebula Award nominations, two Sidewise Award nominations, and a Theodore Sturgeon Award nomination. Steele was also a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award.
Steele serves on the Board of Advisors for the Space Frontier Foundation and is former member of both the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors of the SFWA. In April, 2001, he testified before the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives in hearings regarding the future of American space exploration. “Live from the Mars Hotel” was among the stories included in a DVD library of science fiction that the Planetary Society placed aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander which touched down on Mars in May, 2008
He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and their two dogs.
Peter David
Peter David is a prolific author whose career, and continued popularity, spans nearly two decades. He has worked in every conceivable media: Television, film, books (fiction, non-fiction and audio), short stories, and comic books, and acquired followings in all of them.
In the literary field, Peter has had over fifty novels published, including numerous appearances on the New York Times Bestsellers List. His novels include Sir Apropos of Nothing (A “fast, fun, heroic fantasy satire” — Publishers Weekly) and the sequel The Woad to Wuin, Knight Life, Howling Mad, and the Psi-Man adventure series. He is the co-creator and author of the bestselling Star Trek: New Frontier series for Pocket Books, and has also written such Trek novels as Q-Squared, The Siege, Q-in-Law, Vendetta, I, Q (with John deLancie), A Rock and a Hard Place and Imzadi. He produced the three Babylon 5 Centauri Prime novels, and has also had his short fiction published in such collections as Shock Rock, Shock Rock II, and Otherwere: Stories of Transformation, as well as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Peter’s comic book resume includes an award-winning twelve-year run on The Incredible Hulk, and he has also worked on such varied and popular titles as Supergirl, Young Justice, Soulsearchers and Company, Aquaman, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, X-Factor, Star Trek, Wolverine, The Phantom, Sachs & Violens, and many others. He has also written comic book related novels, such as The Incredible Hulk: What Savage Beast, and co-edited The Ultimate Hulk short story collection. Furthermore, his opinion column But I Digress… has been running in the industry trade newspaper The Comic Buyers’s Guide for nearly a decade, and in that time has been the paper’s consistently most popular feature and was also collected into a trade paperback edition.
Peter is the co-creator, with popular science fiction icon Bill Mumy (of Lost in Space and Babylon 5 fame) of the Cable Ace Award-nominated science fiction series Space Cases, which ran for two seasons on Nickelodeon. He has written several scripts for the Hugo Award winning TV series Babylon 5, and the sequel series, Crusade. He has also written several films for Full Moon Entertainment and co-produced two of them, including two installments in the popular Trancers series, Trancers 4: Jack of Swords and Trancers 5: Sudden Deth, as well as the science fiction western spoof Oblivion, which won the Gold Award at the 1994 Houston International Film Festival for best Theatrical Feature Film, Fantasy/Horror category, and the sequel Backlash: Oblivion 2.
Peter’s awards and citations include: the Haxtur Award 1996 (Spain), Best Comic script; OZCon 1995 award (Australia), Favorite International Writer; Comic Buyers Guide 1995 Fan Awards, Favorite writer; Wizard Fan Award Winner 1993; Golden Duck Award for Young Adult Series (Starfleet Academy: #1: Worf’s First Adventure), 1994; UK Comic Art Award, 1993; Will Eisner Comic Industry Award, 1993. He lives in New York with his wife, Kathleen, and his children, Shana, Gwen, Ariel, and a player to be named later. And even though this may not be the best year to admit it, he’s a Mets fan.
So now you know.
You can also look at Peter’s Wikipedia page and see what other people have written about him. A surprising amount of it is true.
Biographical information courtesy of PeterDavid.net
James Frenkel
Bio Coming Soon!
John Krewson
John Krewson was born with the dubious moniker of Clifton J Horsepepper in Albuquerque, NM under a Bad sign (unable to make it to the hospital, his mother gave birth beneath a billboard sign advertising Michael Jackson’s third solo album).
His father absconded to Papua New Guinea shortly after realizing that Clifton was, in fact, his own son.
At the age of six, Clifton lost part of one eye, and two of his three testicles at a small hummus deli in Rosewell, so his mother shipped him off to boarding school in New Glarus, WI, where she felt he would fit in better and had his name changed to Skeet Mathesson.
She followed her husband’s example, and promptly left the bio.
Skeet left school at the age of 12 and moved to Madison, WI, where he was taught the art of microwaving burgers and deep frying french fries in meat grease by a Mormon priest named Dickers (no relation to any Catholic priests). Under Dickers’ expert tutelage, Skeet excelled at the fine art of steam burns and health code violations, and thusly changed his name a third time to John Aloysius Krewson, learned to spell and started writing personal adds for a small newspaper called the Onion at a local university.
Krewson, full of unrequited spite from a lifetime of name changing and single testicle jokes, killed most of the editors and staff members at the Onion and moved the entire outfit to New York City. The rumors of his expertise at dispatching creative genius and usurping authorship from original creators spread like wild boars through the streets and offices of Mid-town, so the upper management of the Walt Disney Corporation promptly bought the fledgling paper, as they felt they had found a kindred spirit in John Krewson.
He now resides in Brooklyn, where he is attempting to buy and relocate a failing NBA franchise. He has never heard of the Daily Show.
(slander by Fil Resudo)...
Gene Wolfe
Michael Swanwick states, "Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today... Among living writers, there is nobody who can approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning." Winner of numerous literary awards such as World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula (x2), the Prix Apollo, and John W. Campbell. He has written masterful tales that have spanned space, time, and thought, while maintaining his wry humor, caustic wit, and religious insight in every one of his books. Wolfe is not for the mere SF reader: he is for the SF thinker. His works include The Book of the New Sun, Peace, Soldier in the Mist, and the recent collection The Best of Gene Wolfe.
Biographical information compiled from SFBookcase.com and other sources.
Mark W. Tiedemann
Mark W. Tiedemann spun yarns, wrote and drew comics, and constructed elaborate scenarios for summer playtime, mostly out of sheer boredom with reality. Occasionally this practice got him into trouble, but not enough to rehabilitate him. Deciding at some point that writers must be really cool people, he wanted to be one, and set about a wholly disorganized, circuitous path to reach his goal, entailing many sidetracks, one of which led to a career in photography. After spending many years as a photographer, he drifted back to words, and began cranking out stories and trying to sell them.
In 1988 he attended Clarion and shortly thereafter did in fact begin selling his work. Since 1990 he has sold over fifty short stories, to Asimov’s, F & SF, Science Fiction Age, Tomorrow SF, Tales of the Unanticipated, and anthologies such as Universe 2, Vanishing Acts, Bending the Landscape, War of the Worlds: the Global Dispatches and others.
In 1999 he was invited to write in Isaac Asimov’s Robot City universe and subsequently published the Robot Mystery trilogy Mirage, Chimera, and Aurora.
In 2001 the first book of his Secantis Sequence was published by Meisha Merlin. Compass Reach was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award. Two more novels quickly followed, Metal of Night and Peace & Memory. In 2005, standalone novel Remains was published and was shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award.
While all this was going on, he joined the board of directors of the Missouri Center for the Book, the Missouri state affiliate to the Library of Congress Center for the Book, an institution that works to promote and support the state literary heritage and the culture of the book. In 2005, he was elected president and served in that capacity for four years. During his tenure, the Missouri Center for the Book petitioned, campaigned, and persuaded the governor to establish the first state poet laureate for Missouri, a program which the MCB manages. He also worked to revitalize the organization and give it new directions, with new programs like the Missouri Book To Film event in conjunction with the St. Louis International Film Festival, renewed annual conferences, and outreach through a variety of partnering organizations.
He continued to work till recently in the photographic industry. He has lived in St. Louis all his life, for the past 30 years with his companion, best friend, first reader Donna. He occasionally plays piano and guitar, doodles in idle moments, and is somehow, according to friends, still sane after all these years, a condition which could change at any moment.
The Bronze Horseman
A silly person, from here, from there. www.thebronzehorseman.com
Strange Talking Animals
...humans... (no one is really sure...) www.strangetalkinganimals.org