The End of the World -- stories of the apocalypse
Fiction, End of the world, American Science fiction, English Science fiction, Science fiction, american
Martin H. Greenberg, Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Rick Hautala, Lucius Shepard, Norman Spinrad, Lester del Rey, William F. Nolan, Roger Zelazny, Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, John Wyndham, Andrea Edwards, Nancy Kress, Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke, John Helfers, Poul Anderson
Martin Harry Greenberg (March 1, 1941 – June 25, 2011) was an American academic and anthologist in many genres, including mysteries and horror, but especially in speculative fiction. In all, he compiled 1,298 anthologies and commissioned over 8,200 original short stories. He founded Tekno Books, a packager of more than 2000 published books. He was also a co-founder of the Sci-Fi Channel. Greenberg was also an expert in terrorism and the Middle East. He was a longtime friend, colleague and business partner of Isaac Asimov. || Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman born Neil Richard Gaiman, 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards. || Orson Scott Card is an American novelist, critic, public speaker, essayist and columnist. He writes in several genres but is known best for science fiction. His novel Ender's Game (1985) and its sequel Speaker for the Dead (1986) both won Hugo and Nebula Awards, making Card the only author to win both science fiction's top U.S. prizes in consecutive years. || George Raymond Richard Martin (born September 20, 1948), sometimes referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for his ongoing *A Song of Ice and Fire* series of epic fantasy novels.

Critics have described Martin's work as dark and cynical. His first novel, Dying of the Light, set the tone for most of his future work; it is set on a mostly abandoned planet that is slowly becoming uninhabitable as it moves away from its sun. This story, and many of Martin's others, have a strong sense of melancholy. His characters are often unhappy, or at least unsatisfied - trying to stay idealistic in a ruthless world. Many have elements of tragic heroes in them. Reviewer T. M. Wagner writes, "Let it never be said Martin doesn't share Shakespeare's fondness for the senselessly tragic." This gloominess can be an obstacle for some readers. The Inchoatus Group writes, "If this absence of joy is going to trouble you, or you’re looking for something more affirming, then you should probably seek elsewhere."

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  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin || Robert Silverberg is an American author, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for his novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from Yeats' poem; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another; and in 2004 he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

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  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Silverberg || Norman Spinrad is a science fiction icon and the author of more than twenty novels which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His 1969 novel, Bug Jack Barron, was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and his short fiction collection, The Star-Spangled Future, was a National Book Award finalist. He has also written screenplays for American television series, including the original Star Trek. He lives in New York. || Lester del Rey was born Leonard Knapp in Saratoga, Minnesota, the son of poor sharecroppers of partly Spanish ancestry.  His mother died shortly after his birth, and he managed to complete high school and two years at George Washington University before dropping out for economic reasons.  He started publishing stories in pulp magazines in the late 1930s. He was closely associated Astounding Science Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. In 1935, his first wife was killed in a car accident.  By 1947 he had written enough solid short fiction to generate his first book, the anthology And Some Were Human.  In the 1950s, he was a leading science fiction writer.  After marrying his second wife in 1945, he became a full-time writer. In 1947 he met the literary agent Scott Meredith at a convention and he began working for Meredith's agency as a reader and office manager.  He later made his way into editing for pulp magazines and then for book publishers. In 1952 and 1953, he edited Space SF, Fantasy Fiction, Science Fiction Adventures (as Philip St. John), Rocket Stories (as Wade Kampfaert), and Fantasy Fiction (as Cameron Hall).  He was most successful editing for Ballantine Books with his final wife, Judy-Lynn del Rey, and founded a popular science fiction imprint with her at Ballantine, Del Rey Books, in 1977. || About the Author
William F. Nolan is best known as the creator and coauthor of Logan's Run, a bestselling science fiction classic that was made into a hit film, a television series, and a sequence of comic books. He is the author of 13 novels and scores of short stories, and is the editor of more than two dozen books in the fields of science fiction, horror, western, and suspense. He is a two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was voted the Living Legend for 2002 by the International Horror Guild. He lives in West Hills, California.

Info added Nov2012, from amazon & wiki: 
* http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Galaxy-Selected-Science-Fiction/dp/1930846312/
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Nolan || Gregory Benford (Gregory Albert Benford) is an astrophysicist and science fiction author who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.  He is also a contributing editor of Reason magazine.  Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, a series that postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient electromechanical life.

Greg was born in Mobile, Alabama.  He received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Oklahoma, followed by his Masters and then his Doctorate from the University of California, San Diego.  Having published more than 200 scientific papers, his research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics.

Greg is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award and has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the Lord Foundation Prize, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature.  

Source: Secular Policy Institute || John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (10 July 1903 – 11 March 1969) was an English science fiction writer best known for his works written using the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include *The Day of the Triffids* (1951) and *The Midwich Cuckoos* (1957), the latter filmed twice as *Village of the Damned*.

**Source**: [John Wyndham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wyndham) on Wikipedia. || Anne Mikita and Edward Kolaczyk were native mid-westerners, they married on 1972. She taught elementary school, but after the marriage she became a restless housewife and mother of four kids. He was a bored marketing executive of IBM group, where he worked during 23 years until he quit on 1982. On 1976, she started to write romance novels, on 1981 she had a few novels published, and her husband decided collaborate with her, and they became a marriage writing team under female pennames. They discovered, that they are very different, but complementary. They used the pseudonyms of Anne Hillary, Anne Benson, Kathryn Jessup, Erika Bryant, Anne Edwards, Andrea Edwards, and Adriene Edwards, they also signed novels with real names Anne and Ed Kolaczyk. The marriage write in their house in Illinois, where they share housework, cooking and childrearing. || American science fiction writer || Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science-fiction magazines of the 1950s, his many quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical.

Nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards, Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. || Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS was a British science fiction writer, science writer and futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.

He is famous for being co-writer of the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely considered to be one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science writer, who was both an avid populariser of space travel and a futurist of uncanny ability. On these subjects he wrote over a dozen books and many essays, which appeared in various popular magazines. In 1961 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize, an award which is given by UNESCO for popularising science. These along with his science fiction writings eventually earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His other science fiction writings earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership made him one of the towering figures of science fiction. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.

Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system using geostationary orbits. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946–1947 and again in 1951–1953.

Clarke emigrated from England to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his fame later on in the 1980s, from being the host of several television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death.

Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka". He was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

---From Wikipedia || Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.

Source: Goodreads