Steven Utley is an American science fiction writer born in 1948. In the 1970s, as his first published stories began to appear, Utley was part of a group of writers in and near Austin, Texas that also included Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, and Lisa Tuttle, a group that later called itself the Turkey City Writers’ Workshop. Among Utley’s best-known works from this period was a collaboration with Waldrop, “Custer’s Last Jump.” His “Silurian Tales” sequence of time-travel stories began to appear in 1993; several the individual stories have been reprinted in various Year’s Best collections.

Michael Bishop is an American science fiction writer, born November 12, 1945 in Lincoln, Nebraska. His stories began to appear in American science fiction magazines in 1970; his first novel, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, appeared in 1975. Since then, in sixteen subsequent novels and several story collections, he has produced one of the most distinguished bodies of work in modern SF.  His work has won the Nebula Award twice, for “The Quickening” in 1981 and for the novel No Enemy But Time in 1982; he has also received the Locus Award four times and has been a frequent finalist for the Hugo. His fantasy novel Unicorn Mountain (1988) won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.  Among his most acclaimed works are the novels Transfigurations (1979), Ancient of Days (1985), Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas (1987, originally published as The Secret Ascension), and 1994’s Brittle Innings, a novel about Frankenstein’s monster, having survived the nineteenth century, playing minor league baseball in the American South during World War II.