Kevin J. Anderson (born March 27, 1962) is an American science fiction author. He has written spin-off novels for Star Wars, StarCraft, Titan A.E., and The X-Files, and is the co-author of the Dune prequels. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award-nominated Assemblers of Infinity. He has also written several comic books including the Dark Horse Star Wars collection Tales of the Jedi written in collaboration with Tom Veitch, Predator titles (also for Dark Horse), and X-Files titles for Topps. Kevin is also writing a book based on the first meeting of Batman and Superman, entitled "Enemies and Allies: A Novel". Another DC comics related novel by Anderson is "The Last Days of Krypton," telling the story of how Krypton came to be destroyed and the choice two parents had to make for their son.

Anderson serves as a judge in the Writers of the Future contest.

Climbing Olympus  examines the colonization of Mars by biologically-altered humans--exploring what it truly means to be human. A group of exiles, surgically altered so that they can survive in Mars's atmosphere but no longer tolerate Earth's, plot to destroy the corrupt project to colonize the fourth planet. Ties into Anderson's final book in the Jedi Academy trilogy.

Alan Dean Foster (born November 18, 1946) is a prolific American author of fantasy and science fiction. He currently resides in Prescott, Arizona, with his wife, and is also known for his novelisations of film scripts. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Foster has been so prolific that he is often rumored to have been the ghostwriter on novels with which he had little direct involvement, such as the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was credited to (and actually written by) Gene Roddenberry. Foster wrote the treatment on which the film was based, perhaps accounting for the misattribution of the novel to him. He also authored 10 volumes of novelizations based upon Star Trek: The Animated Series, several of which involving taking the script for a half-hour episode and expanding it into a full-length novel. He later wrote the novelization of the 2009 film Star Trek, his first Star Trek novel in over 30 years.

It has long been known that Foster co-wrote the original novelization of Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) which had been credited solely to George Lucas. When asked if it was difficult for him to see Lucas get all the credit for Star Wars, Foster said "Not at all. It was George's story. I was merely expanding upon it. Not having my name on the cover didn't bother me in the least. It would be akin to a contractor demanding to have his name on a Frank Lloyd Wright house."

The Mocking Program is a 2002 novel. It is a hard-boiled police procedural set in a highly imaginative megalopolis called the Montezuma Strip, which stretches along the old U.S.-Mexican border. When police inspector Angel Cardenas investigates the case of a male corpse found with most of its internal organs missing, the victim turns out to have had two identities - one as a local executive, the other as a Texas businessman. The plot thickens when the victim's booby-trapped house nearly kills Cardenas and his partner. The author makes use of a vast array of futuristic elements; notably, sapient apes led by gorillas and intelligent rogue computers that commit computer crimes.

Le Guin has received five Hugo awards and five Nebula awards , and was awarded the Gandalf Grand Master award in 1979 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2003. She has received eighteen Locus Awards for her fiction, more than any other author. Her novel The Farthest Shore won the National Book Award for Children's Books in 1973.

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is a 1974 utopian science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, set in the same fictional universe as that of The Left Hand of Darkness (the Hainish Cycle). The book won the Nebula Award in 1974, both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1975, and received a nomination for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975. It is also notable for achieving a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction works.

The story of The Dispossessed is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti. Cetians are mentioned in other Ekumen novels and short stories. An Anarresti appears in the short story The Shobies' Story. Urras before the settlement of Anarres is the setting for the short story The Day Before the Revolution. In The Dispossessed, Urras is divided into several states which are dominated by the two largest ones, which are rivals.

The story has many themes, as well as the creation of the ansible, an instantaneous communications device that plays a critical role in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle. (The invention of the ansible places the novel first in the internal chronology of the Hainish Cycle, although it was the fifth Hainish novel published.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was born March 23, 1947, and lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington. Elizabeth won a Nebula Award in 1989 for her novel The Healer's War, and has written more than a dozen other novels. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey, best-known for creating the Dragonriders of Pern, to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

No one could have told Lt. Kitty McCulley that this was what it meant to be a war nurse. That she was going to Vietnam not to heal, but to ready her patients for the real pain. Not to alleviate suffering, but to become an object of contempt and misdirected lust. Not to try to save all victims, but to choose sides against people she thought she was there to help. No one could have told her. And it wouldn't have made any difference anyway.

When one of her patients, a revered Vietnamese holy man, gives Kitty an unusual amulet, her world is changed forever. The amulet gives her the power to navigate through the treacherous human maze of friends and foes--and to touch people in a way that gives meaning to life in the midst of a meaningless war. It is a power she will need to save not only her sanity, but her life. For when Kitty is stranded in the enemy-held jungle with a child and a lone American soldier, she becomes witness to war at its most horrifying ... and its most human.

n the mid-1970s, Pohl acquired and edited novels for Bantam Books, published as "Frederik Pohl Selections"; the most notable were Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and Joanna Russ's The Female Man. Also in the 1970s, Pohl reemerged as a novel writer in his own right, with books such as Man Plus and the Heechee series. He won back-to-back Nebula awards with Man Plus in 1976 and Gateway, the first Heechee novel, in 1977. Gateway also won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Two of his stories have also earned him Hugo awards: "The Meeting" (with Kornbluth) tied in 1973 and "Fermi and Frost" won in 1986. Another notable late novel is Jem (1980), winner of the National Book Award. Pohl continues to write and had a new story, "Generations", published in September 2005. A novel begun by Arthur C. Clarke called "The Last Theorem" was finished by Pohl and published on August 5, 2008.


Gateway is a 1977 science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl. Gateway won the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1978 Locus Award for Best Novel, the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1978 John W. Campbell Award. It is the opening novel in the Heechee saga. Several sequels followed, and the novel was adapted into a computer game in 1992.

Gateway is a hollow asteroid, constructed by the Heechee, a long vanished alien race, as a spaceport. It was first discovered by an explorer on Venus, who found a small ship, fiddled with the controls and accidentally triggered its return (with him inside) to its home port, Gateway. Once there, he was unable to figure out how to get back, but before he committed suicide (he would have run out of supplies long before he could be rescued), he was able to signal Gateway's location to other humans.

Lyon Sprague de Camp (November 27, 1907 – November 6, 2000) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy books, nonficiton and biography. In a writing career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and notable works of nonfiction, including biographies of other important fantasy authors.

De Camp's science fiction is marked by a concern for linguistics and historical forces. His first published story was "The Isolinguals", in the September 1937 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. His most highly regarded works in the genre are his time travel and alternate history stories, including Lest Darkness Fall (1939), "The Wheels of If" (1940), "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956), "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958), and The Glory That Was (1960) – in the last of which the "time travel" actually turns out to be a tour de force of historical recreation.

His most extended work was his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, set in a future where Brazil is the dominant power, particularly a subseries of sword and planet novels set on the planet Krishna, beginning with The Queen of Zamba. His most influential Viagens novel was the non-Krishna work Rogue Queen, a tale of a hive society undermined by interstellar contact, which was one of the earliest science fiction novels to deal with sexual themes.

Rogue Queen is the third book in his Viagens Interplanetarias series. It was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1951, and in paperback by Dell Books in 1952. On the planet of the star Lalande 21185 known to Terrans as Ormazd, the dominant humanoid species is organized into hive societies much like those of Earth's ants and bees. In each community a hyper-fertile queen and a handful of male drones are responsible for reproduction, while all other tasks are performed by sterile female workers. This status quo is disrupted by the Paris, an exploratory spacecraft of the Viagens Interplanetarias, Earth's space authority. Its mixed crew of socially equal and universally fertile males and females opens up other possibilities to the natives, and particularly to Iroedh, a scholarly worker from the community of Elham.

Jack Dann (born 15 February 1945) is an American writer best known for his science fiction, an editor and a writing teacher, who has lived in Australia since 1994. He has published over seventy books, in the majority of cases as editor or co-editor of story anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He has published nine novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, essays and poetry and his books have been translated into thirteen languages. His work, which includes fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism and historical and alternative history genres, has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.

The Memory Cathedral is the secret history of Leonardo da Vinci, adventurer, traveller, inventor, and lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent′s mistress.

Based on Leonardo′s own notebooks, this expansive, multi-layered novel is ostensibly about Leonardo′s flying machines. But it is really a magical exploration of the man, his drives, his loves, his friends, and fabulous inventions. It takes place in the Florence of Lorenzo de Medici and in the fabled, mythical east. Indeed, there is real evidence that Leonardo travelled to Egypt and Persia under the protection of the Devatdar of Syria, Lieutenant of the Sacred Sultan of Babylon.

Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7 1907 – May 8 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers," he was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of the genre. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was one of the first writers to break into mainstream, general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, in the late 1940s, with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a best-selling 1961 Hugo Award-winning] science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians on the planet Mars, upon his return to Earth in early adulthood. The novel explores his interaction with — and eventual transformation of — Earth culture. The novel's title refers to the Biblical Book of Exodus.  According to Heinlein in Grumbles from the Grave, the novel's working title was The Heretic. Several later editions of the book have promoted it as "The most famous Science Fiction Novel ever written."

Carolyn Janice Cherry (born September 1, 1942), better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is a United States science fiction and fantasy author. She has written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award winning novels Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both set in her Alliance-Union universe.

The author has an asteroid, 77185 Cherryh, named after her. Referring to this honor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory writes of Cherryh: "She has challenged us to be worthy of the stars by imagining how mankind might grow to live among them."

Downbelow Station is a science fiction novel written by C. J. Cherryh and published in 1981 by DAW Books. It won the Hugo Award in 1982, was shortlisted for a Locus Award that same year, and was named by Locus Magazine as one of the top 50 science fiction novels of all time in 1987.

The book is set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe during the Company Wars period, specifically late 2352 and early 2353. The book details events centering on a space station in orbit around Pell's World (also known as "Downbelow") in the Tau Ceti star system. The station serves as the transit point for ships moving between the Earth and Union sectors of the galaxy.

The working title of the book was The Company War, but Cherryh's editor at DAW, Donald A. Wollheim, believed that the moniker lacked commercial appeal, so Downbelow Station was selected as the title for publication.

All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a novel written by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes in graphic detail the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental duress experienced during fighting in this war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.

The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in late January 1929. The book and its sequel, The Road Back, were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany. It sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print.

In 1930, the book was turned into an Oscar-winning movie of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone.

Paul Bäumer is the narrator and main character of the novel, representing Remarque's own experience in World War I. With a number of his eighteen year old classmates, Paul, who is an amateur writer of several poems and a play, enlists in the German Army for World War I. He is deployed to the western front, where he experiences the devastating physical and psychological effects of intense combat, including the horrific wounding or death of his friends. Paul reflects on the war as he witnesses the dehumanizing conditions of combat and the robbing of soldiers of their individuality and love of life.