Elanso

JOHN SHIRLEY "known for astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work, addresses the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering... And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained, the prose attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. His fiction, however, is only sometimes recognizably horror, as Shirley was also one of the primary cyberpunk writers, in company with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker." His "lost cyberpunk novel" Black Glass, is due out in August from ESP books, with the urban fantasy novel Bleak History from Simon & Schuster to follow. John Shirley also wrote several suspense novels including Spider Moon and The Brigade, and won a Bram Stoker Award for his collection Black Butterflies. His best-known science fiction novels are City Come A-Walkin', the Eclipse trilogy, and A Splendid Chaos.

DANIEL MARCUS has published around twenty short stories in literary and genre venues, including Witness, Asimovs, Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, ZYZZYVA, and F&SF. Most of these stories will be collected in Binding Energy, appearing soon from Elastic Press. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and placed in the Asimov's Readers' Poll Top 10. His nonfiction has appeared in Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, on Boing-Boing, and he is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. After a spectacularly unsuccessful career attempt as a saxophonist, Daniel earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley. Currently a technology executive for a digital multimedia firm, Daniel lives in Berkeley, California, and he has authored more than twenty articles in the applied mathematics and computational physics literature, although the three are not mutually exclusive. Binding Energy is already garnering high praise, such as this from Mike Driscoll at The Fix: "If he deploys the mechanics of SF and fantasy, it is as a mean to explore worlds and mental landscapes defined by disconnectedness and isolation, by degradation and deceit, by love and its absence. This is not to say that these stories are filled with gloom and despair. Quite the contrary, most of them, despite their degraded physical or spiritual terrain, are marked by a sense of hope and possibility."

Lounge and cash bar open at 6:00 PM
7:00 PM readings
The Variety Preview Room
The Hobart Building, 1st Floor
582 Market St. @ Montgomery & 2nd, by Montgomery St. MUNI/BART
Entrance to the Hobart Bldg. is between Citibank and Quiznos