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Fri, 12/14/2007

Penguin Imprint Focus: Subgenres in SF/F - Fantasy:

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Fantasy conjures images of dragons and wizards, and has roots in ancient myths and legends. Magic and other supernatural elements dominate the plot, and it is distinguished from horror and science fiction in both feel and theme, though there is often a great deal of overlap. Internal consistency is as important as it is in science fiction, even if the rules and paradigm are utterly strange and fantastical. From Beowulf to The Lord of the Rings through to the writers of today, Fantasy is a venerable and thriving genre.

Patricia McKillip

Pat McKillip was born in Salem, Oregon, the daughter of an Air Force officer. Between 1958 and 1962 he was stationed with his family in Germany and England. McKillip attended San Jose State earning her B.A. in 1971 and M.A. in 1973, the year she also published her first two books, The Throme of the Erril of Sherrill and The House on Parchment Street, which she had been writing while she was supposed to be studying. She has been publishing novels ever since, moving frequently about the US until settling down in Oregon with her husband. Patricia A. McKillip is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the author of many fantasy novels, including The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Od Magic and Cygnet.

Guy Kaye

Guy Gavriel Kay was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, on 7 November 1954. Kay himself trained to be a lawyer, earning his LL.B. from the University of Toronto after his B.A. in philosophy from Manitoba. However, he now earns his living as a novelist. Kay currently lives in Toronto with his wife Laura and their two sons.

Guy Gavriel Kay is the internationally bestselling author of eight books. He has been awarded the International Goliardos Prize for his work in the literature of the fantastic, is a two-time winner of the Aurora Award, and has been nominated three times for the World Fantasy Award. His works have been translated into 21 languages. He was retained by J.R.R. Tolkien's estate to work with Christopher Tolkien in the reconstruction of the posthumously published Tolkien work, The Silmarillion. His earliest novels, the trilogy known as The Finovarr Tapestry, were heavily influenced by this experience.

Sharon Shinn

Sharon Shinn is a journalist who works for an on-line trade magazine. Her first novel, The Shapechanger's Wife, was selected by Locus as the best first fantasy novel of 1995. She has won the William C. Crawford Award for Outstanding New Fantasy Writer, and was twice nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. A graduate of Northwestern University, she has lived in the Midwest most of her life. Her best-known works are the novels in the Samaria series, a story cycle that is often compared to Anne McCaffrey's Pern books.

Dennis McKiernan

Dennis L. McKiernan was born April 4, 1932, in Moberly, Missouri, where he lived until age eighteen, when he joined the U.S. Air Force and served four years spanning the Korean War. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri in 1958 and an M.S. in the same field from Duke University in 1964. He spent thirty-one years as one of the AT&T Bell Laboratories whiz kids in research and development before changing careers to be a full-time writer.

Currently living in Tucson, Arizona, Dennis began writing novels in 1977 while recuperating from a close encounter of the crunch kind with a 1967 red and black Plymouth Fury (Dennis lost: it ran over him: Plymouth 1, Dennis 0). Among other hobbies, Dennis enjoys scuba diving, dirt-bike riding, and motorcycle touring-all enthusiasms shared by his wife of fifty years, Martha Lee. He's written over 20 novels and his best-known series is set in a fantasy world called Mithgar,

Stephen Donaldson

Born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio, Stephen R. Donaldson lived in India (where his father was a medical missionary) until 1963. He graduated from the College of Wooster (Ohio) in 1968, served two years as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, doing hospital work in Akron, then attended Kent State University, where he received his M.A. in English in 1971.

After dropping out of his Ph.D. program and moving to New Jersey in order to write fiction, Donaldson made his publishing debut with the first "Covenant" trilogy in 1977. That enabled him to move to a healthier climate. He now lives in New Mexico.

The novels for which he is best known have received a number of awards. However, the achievements of which he is most proud are the ones that seemed the most unlikely. In 1993 he received a Doctor of Literature degree from the College of Wooster, and in 1994 he gained a black belt in Shotokan karate from Sensei Mike Heister and Anshin Personal Defense.

After completing the five-book, seven-year Gap sequence of science fiction novels, Donaldson spent quite some time "on vacation." However, he has now returned to work on the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Marian Zimmer Bradley

Marion Zimmer was born in Albany, NY, on June 3, 1930, and married Robert Alden Bradley in 1949. Mrs. Bradley received her B.A. in 1964 from Hardin Simmons University in Abilene, Texas, then did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1965-67.

She was a science fiction/fantasy fan from her middle teens, and made her first sale as an adjunct to an amateur fiction contest in Fantastic/Amazing Stories in 1949. She had written as long as she could remember, but wrote only for school magazines and fanzines until 1952, when she sold her first professional short story to Vortex Science Fiction. She wrote everything from science fiction to Gothics, but is probably best known for her Darkover novels and for the international best-seller The Mists of Avalon.

In addition to her novels, Mrs. Bradley edited many magazines, amateur and professional, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, which she started in 1988. She also edited an annual anthology called Sword and Sorceress for DAW Books.

She died in Berkeley, California on September 25, 1999, four days after suffering a major heart attack.

Young Adult Fantasy

Brian Jacques

"I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc., to find success writing children's novels," says Brian Jacques (pronounced "Jakes"). Yet it is all too true. With the publication of his first children's book in 1987, the award-winning Redwall, Jacques' fresh talent has received exceptional praise from reviewers in the United States and England. Redwall became a series of books, and Jacques went on to even greater acclaim and success.

Brian Jacques was born in Liverpool, England on June 15th, 1939, where he grew up in the area around the docks. He attended St. John's School, an inner city school that had its playground on the roof. After Brian finished school at fifteen, he set out to find adventure as a merchant seaman. He traveled to many far away ports, including New York, Valparaiso, San Francisco, and Yokohama. Tiring of the lonely life of a sailor, he returned to Liverpool where he worked as a railway fireman, a longshoreman, a long-distance truck driver, a bus driver, a boxer, a bobby (Police Constable 216D), a postmaster, and a stand-up comic.

TA Barron

T.A. Barron is the award-winning author of fantasy novels such as The Lost Years of Merlin epic-soon to be a major motion picture. He serves on a variety of environmental and educational boards including The Nature Conservancy and The Land and Water Fund of the Rockies, and is the founder of a national award for heroic children.

Barron was raised on ranch country in Colorado, and then proceeded to excel in scholastic studies, graduating from Princeton and attending Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned an honors B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. During that time he traveled extensively, backpacking in Asia, Africa and the Arctic (as a result, he often jokes that he majored in hiking trails.) From 1982 to 1990 Barron served in management positions in venture capital firms in New York City, until he decided to leave his successful business career to write full-time in 1990. Barron has written seventeen books, but is happiest when on the mountain trails with his wife, Currie, and their five children.

Robin McKinley

Robin McKinley's father was in the Navy, and as a result she moved every couple of years, traveling about the US and to locations as distant as Japan. Enamored from a young age with stories (both the reading and writing of them), she decided upon learning that authorship could be a profession that that was the life for her. Interested in writing stories with girls as the main characters, she wandered and wrote until settling down in a coastal village in Maine, intent on finally sinking her roots and staying there for good. This resolution proved true until she met English writer Peter Dickinson, and chose to relocate to England.