About the Contributors

Cover Artist

Michael Honch is a bass player, runner, and medical librarian living in Takoma Park, MD.

Authors

Antoinette LaFarge is a professor of digital media in the Department of Art, University of California, Irvine. She has written extensively on subjects related to forgery, constructed worlds, avatars, and computational media.

Dr. Kristine Larsen holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Connecticut (1990) and has taught astronomy at Central Connecticut State University since 1989. Her research focuses on the intersections between science and society, including the history of women in science, the popularization of science, and science and popular culture. She is the author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, and the forthcoming The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19thCentury.

Morgan Luck completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and a PGCE in Religious Education at the University of Cambridge. His thesis concerned the metaphysics of miracles. His areas of research include philosophy of religion, metaphysics, epistemology, and computer game ethics.

Chris Mich, a science fiction fanatic, has been privileged to write for film, television, theater, newspapers and electronic retailing. He’s written, directed, and produced several short films and television productions that have been honored as official selections in multiple venues including Berlin International Film Festival, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, and the Official Star Wars Fan Film Fest. In addition to hiking, birding, reading, writing, vlogging, praying and eating a good cheesesteak, Chris enjoys spending time with his wife and six children.

Book Reviewers

Alexander Cendrowski is pursuing his MFA at the University of South Florida (USA). He is a lemonade, ocean, and writing enthusiast, and his fiction recently appeared in Word Riot, The Legendary, and Perversion Magazine.

Steven Gentry is a graduate student studying Archives Management at Simmons College. He also serves as an Archives and Research Assistant at the Digital Collections and Archives of Tufts University.

Jen Jenkins is a teaching assistant at Northern Illinois University, where she is pursuing a PhD in English. Previously, she worked as an adjunct professor at Rockford University, where she taught classes in Rhetoric and Science Fiction.

Editors

Heather McHale (Managing Editor) holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Maryland (USA), where she teaches writing and literature. Her current work in progress is a book about the television series Doctor Who. Her research interests range from science fiction and detective fiction to Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope.

Aisha Matthews (Assistant Managing Editor) holds a B.A. in English from Yale University (USA) and is currently completing her M.A. Her thesis is on Foucauldian discourse of power within Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, and she is also working on a conference paper in Harry Potter Studies on American colonial imagery within the texts. Aisha’s other research interests include afrofuturisms, postmodern feminist discourse, and science and speculative fictions.

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (Editor) holds a Ph.D. in Literature—with a focus on science fiction from the late 19th to mid-20th century Britain and Bengal—from the University of Oslo (Norway), where he is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the history of science (medicine). He employs science studies approaches to the study of science fiction, with an emphasis on medicine, health and race discourses.

Thomas Connolly (Editor) is a final-year Ph.D. student at Maynooth University (Ireland), and his thesis examines depictions of technology in Anglo-American science fiction from H.G. Wells and Jules Verne to J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin, using a mix of theories derived from ecocriticism and philosophy of technology. His research interests include depictions of disability—particularly intellectual disability—and he has presented papers on Daniel Keyes and Philip K. Dick.

Jandy Hanna (Editor) holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and anatomy and is a faculty member at West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine (USA), where she is also the chair of the biomedical sciences department. She is a comparative anatomist and functional morphologist by trade, and she recently completed a master’s thesis in research bioethics on cognition in great apes as evidence for personhood.

Barbara Jasny (Editor) holds a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University (USA) and her career has been science-first, performing research in molecular biology and virology and then becoming a research Editor and Deputy Editor for Science magazine. She has communicated science through books, articles, posters, art displays, virtual presentations, meetings, digital media, and podcasts.

Melanie Marotta (Editor) holds a Ph.D. in English from Morgan State University (USA), where she is currently a Lecturer in the Department of English and Language Arts. She is originally from the province of Ontario in Canada, and her research focuses on science fiction, the American West, contemporary American Literature, and Ecocriticism.