Guests of Honor

Writer Guest of Honor:
Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock is a British writer, editor, musician and publisher, best known for his stories and novels featuring the characters Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius. His body of work contains around 75 novels, countless short stories, and he has appeared on a variety of rock albums, including several of his own.

Born in 1939 in London, Moorcock began self-publishing his own fanzines – mostly on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Jazz – from the age of ten. In 1956 he became the editor of Tarzan Adventures which published his own Sojan the Swordsman stories. In 1958 Moorcock became Assistant Editor of Sexton Blake Library. In 1959 Moorcock’s first professional SF story, ‘Peace on Earth’ (with Barrington Bayley) appeared in John Carnell’s New Worlds, which would be the start of a long association with the magazine. With the encouragement of Carnell, Moorcock created his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, who débuted in the short story ‘The Dreaming City’ (Science Fantasy #47, June 1961).

More fantasy and sf stories followed over the next three years, including ‘The Eternal Champion’ and ‘The Sundered Worlds’, which culminated in Moorcock cementing his fantasy legacy with the four-part Elric epic, Stormbringer. In 1964 Moorcock succeeded Carnell as editor of New Worlds and for the rest of the decade would spearhead the New Wave of British Science Fiction, publishing writers like J.G. Ballard, Philip K Dick, John Brunner, Langdon Jones, Thomas M. Disch, Roger Zelazny, M. John Harrison, and many others.

Moorcock has written an astounding number of series, including the Elric Saga, the Eternal Champion series, the Michael Kane series, the Runestaff series, the Jerry Cornelius series, the Corum series, and the Dancers at the End of Time series. His four novel ‘Colonel Pyat’ series, written over a period of 25 years, seeks the causes of the Nazi holocaust. Many consider his Warlord of the Air, part of the Bastable series, to be the first steam punk novel.

Moorcock has received numerous awards in his career, as well. In 1967, Moorcock won the prestigious Nebula Award for Best Novella with his SF story ‘Behold the Man’ (NW #166, Sept 1966). He has also received the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for Best Novel four times (1972, 1973, 1975, and 1976), the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the World Fantasy Award (Best Novel) in 1979 for Gloriana, British Fantasy Award in 1993, the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2000, the Prix Utopiales “Grandmaster” Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in the horror genre in 2004, and the SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2008. The London Times named him one of the top fifty British novelists since 1945.

Although his heroic fantasies have been his most consistently reprinted books in the United States, he has also achieved prominence in the UK as a literary author, with the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1977 for The Condition of Muzak, and with Mother London which was short-listed for the 1988 Whitbread Best Novel Award.

Website: www.multiverse.org

Artist Guest of Honor:
Robert Gould

For over 30 years, Imaginosis President Robert Gould has been involved with the development, creation, and production of art and story for all media. In 1974, Robert received a Bachelor’s Degree of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art, majoring in Art Education with a minor in Literature and Film.

In 1978, Robert began his career as a book cover designer and illustrator by designing the covers for the six book Elric of Melnibone saga, his sensitive watercolors and dramatic graphic design contrasting sharply with the style of fantasy illustration at the time and proved wildly popular. He continued to re-design Moorcock’s entire fantasy publishing line of over 50 books, developing a distinct but interrelated style for each series. His work garnered him many awards, including the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1991 and spawned a new style of fantasy illustration both in the US and Europe.

For over fifteen years, Robert continued his career as a book designer and illustrator for publishers in the US and Europe, completing well over 180 cover designs.

In the late 1980s, Robert moved from Boston to Los Angeles and began spending more time in Devon, England with fellow artists Alan Lee and Brian Froud. Having always had a strong interest in the visual narrative aspects of film, Robert left the field of book design in 1991 to explore the possibilities of bringing fantasy and mythic fiction to the screen.

In 1999 Robert formed Imaginosis, a media arts company that works with visual artists and writers to collaboratively create and strategically develop entertainment intellectual properties that have broad, transmedia applications while maintaining the integrity, quality, depth of imagination, vision, philosophy, locale, characters and paraphernalia unique to the property and the creator’s original vision. In 2005, Robert formed Imaginosis Publishing, a division of Imaginosis.

– Excerpted from Imaginosis