Saturday, May 19th
Join us for an evening with Ysabeau Wilce, Marie Brennan & Erin Hoffman
Ysabeau Wilce is an award winning American author of young adult fantasy novels. Originally from Northern California, as an adult she has traveled the world, and has a graduate degree in military history and now lives in San Francisco. She maintains an unusual and interesting website that complements her books; delightfully different!
The first book in the series, Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog, received a starred review in Kirkus, was a VOYA Best Book of 2006, and was on the Tiptree Award Honor List for 2006.
Wilce was the winner of the 2008 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy for her second book, Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room). It was also on the James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honor list for 2008. Her third book, Flora’s Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light, is just released, having already garnered praise from Kirkus: “Though Califa and environs are every bit as wacky and flavorful as before, Flora herself is no longer so foolish a child. The result is both richer and less funny: Ridiculous mishaps have been replaced with sometimes-heartbreaking moments of personal growth (and an ancestral ghost octopus).”
Her short fiction includes “Metal More Attractive” (2004, F&SF); “The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror” (2004, Asimov’s); “The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” (2006, F&SF, 19th Annual Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror); “Quartermaster Returns” (2007, Eclipse One); and “Hand in Glove” (2011, Steampunk!). More to come, we hope!
Marie Brennan is an American fantasy author, and is the pseudonym of Bryn Neuenschwander. A former academic from Harvard, with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, which she now puts to rather cockeyed use in writing fantasy, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her website, Swan’s Tower, contains not only the usual information on Brennan, but also various and sundry essays, musings, rants, screeds, and bits of unsolicited advice.
Her works include the forthcoming A Natural History of Dragons (due from Tor, 2013); Doppelganger (2006)(reissued as Warrior, 2008); and Warrior and Witch (2006)(reissued as Witch in 2008). Her Onyx Court series includes the titles Midnight Never Come (2008); In Ashes Lie (2009); A Star Shall Fall (2010); and With Fate Conspire (2011). She has published numerous short fiction pieces in Talebones, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, On Spec, and in many other publications. Brennan’s honors include the Grand Prize, Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, 2003, for “Calling into Silence”, and being long-listed for the British Fantasy Award for In Ashes Lie (2010), and for Midnight Never Come (2009).
Erin Hoffman, author and video game designer, resides in Northern California, where she works as a Lead Game Designer at Loot Drop, a social game company founded by game industry super-veterans John Romero, Brenda Brathwaite, and Tom Hall. She is the author of the Chaos Knight series from Pyr books “If you like hard-hitting fantasy adventure with a lot of magic, this is your series.” (Piers Anthony). The first book in the series, Sword of Fire and Sea, is followed by Lance of Earth and Sky (April 2012), and will conclude with Shield of Sea and Space in 2013.
Her video game credits include DragonRealms, Shadowbane: The Lost Kingdom, GoPets: Vacation Island, Kung Fu Panda World, and FrontierVille. She writes for the award-winning online magazine The Escapist, and has seen her fiction and poetry in Asimov’s, Electric Velocipede, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. In 2004 her blog on game industry working conditions, “EA-The Human Story,” was covered by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times, and is now referenced in numerous game history and corporate history studies. She also appeared in The Best Software Writing I, edited by Joel Spolsky.
Erin’s games have won multiple awards and have been played by millions of kids and adults worldwide. She blogs online at her website, on gaming, writing, and a bunch of other interesting subjects. She is multiethnic, with family names including Lee, Asakawa (yonsei), and Drake in addition to Hoffman.
6:00PM – doors and cash bar open
7:00PM – event starts
$5-$10 donation at the door benefits Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California – to date, we’ve helped raise over $30,000 for the kids in our community! Learn more here!
The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor — entrance between Quiznos and Citibank
582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery
San Francisco, CA 94104
Don’t Drive — BART/MUNI Montgomery Street station is right at our front door, and parking in San Francisco sucks!!! Street parking ($3.50 per hour) is metered M-Sat., til 6PM; find a parking garage here.