We are pleased to welcome this years Guests of Honor
Howard Waldrop
Born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, Howard Waldrop is an American iconoclast.
His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, Things Will Never Be the Same, as well as Other Worlds, Better Lives.
Several of his stories have been nominated for the genre’s awards; “The Ugly Chickens” won a Nebula Award for best novelette in 1980, and a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 1981.
“Howard Waldrop doesn’t have e-mail. He doesn’t have a word processor. He doesn’t surf the Internet. I guess that means he spends most of his time writing. From my point of view as a devoted Waldrop reader, I’m eternally grateful to the Luddite in him.” – Janis Ian
“Clever, humorous, idiosyncratic, oddball, personal, wild, and crazy.” – Library Journal
“Wise and funny.” — Publishers Weekly
“An authentic master of gonzo sf and fantasy.” — Booklist
“Waldrop subtly mutates the past, extrapolating the changes into some of the most insightful, and frequently amusing, stories being written today, in or out of the science fiction genre.” – The Houston Post/Sun
“The resident Weird Mind of his generation, he writes like a honky-tonk angel.… If Philip K. Dick is our homegrown Borges (as Ursula K. Le Guin once said), then Waldrop is our very American magic-realist, as imaginative and playful as early Garcia Marquez or, better yet, Italo Calvino.” – Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
Edie Stern
Co-winner (with husband Joe Siclari) of the Big Heart Award, presented at MidAmericon II, 2016
Webmaster of the FANAC Fan History Project website.
Chair or co-chair of Tropicon VII, Smofcon 18, and FanHistoricon 10.
Editor of the FANAC Fanhistory Project on YouTube, and the Newszine Project on fanac.org .
Often cited as “one of the most intelligent people of the computer age,” and holds over 100 patents for technological innovations used in telephones, digital media, video conferencing, self-driving cars, and the internet.
Recently retired from IBM, she has been named a “Distinguished Engineer,” and won the 2012 Kate Gleason Award for lifetime achievement in technology from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Moshe Feder
A time traveler in training, an alien spy, or perhaps merely an aspiring renaissance man, Moshe acquires and edits bestselling Science Fiction and Fantasy as a Consulting Senior Editor for Tor Books, a division of Macmillan which recently moved from the Flatiron Building in midtown to the landmark Equitable Building on lower Broadway across the street from where Alexander Hamilton is buried.
Moshe began his editorial career while still in college when he worked part time as Assistant Editor for the magazines Amazing and Fantastic. Later, he was an SF&F reviewer for Publishers Weekly and Science Fiction Chronicle, Assistant Editor of the SF Book Club, Editor in Chief of the Military Book Club, a reviewer for Asimov’s SF Magazine, and an Associate Editor and Editor at Tor Books, which he joined in 2000.
He has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards and a member of the Sidewise Awards jury. His first and only short story appeared in Damon Knight’s Orbit 16 in 1975. A 2011 nominee for the Best Editor Hugo Award, he had his first #1 New York Times bestseller with 2014’s Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. In 2015 he was honored by NESFA with the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award (known as “the Skylark”) recognizing his devotion to the field as both a fan and a pro.
He has worked with such authors as Gene Wolfe, Isaac Asimov, Paul Park, Scott Westerfeld, Harlan Ellison, Hal Clement, Donald Kingsbury, F. Paul Wilson, Charles Stross, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Robert J. Sawyer, and Eric Van Lustbader. His current list includes Robert Silverberg, David Gerrold, Brandon Sanderson, and Michael Moorcock.
Moshe is a proud and passionate native New Yorker who roots for the Mets, Yankees, Giants, and Jets. He also barracks for the Collingwood Magpies of Melbourne, Australia. His diverse interests include classical music, Broadway theatre, physics, cognitive science, the histories of Judaism and Christianity, architecture and design, New York City, food and cooking, railroads and mass transit, space exploration, world’s fairs, Coca-Cola collectibles, Komodo Dragons, progressive politics and human rights, Zionism, jazz, singer songwriters, SF fandom, mimeography, and photography. He also talks to cats, whistles, advocates the Oxford comma, and requires chocolate.
Moshe lives in Flushing, NY with his cat Nemo (jointly named for the captain and the Winsor McCay character, not the fish). He’ll be happy to explain why you’ve probably never eaten bagels and lox, even though you’re sure you have.