FOGcon

We are excited to announce the 2012 Honored Guests.

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica, has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana and for the past 30 years in Canada. She is the author of four novels and a short story collection (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, Skin Folk). She is the editor of fiction anthologies Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Mojo: Conjure Stories. She is the co-editor of fiction anthologies So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (with Uppinder Mehan) and Tesseracts Nine (with Geoff Ryman). Hopkinson’s work has received Honourable Mention in Cuba’s “Casa de las Americas” literary prize. She is a recipient of the Warner Aspect First Novel Award, the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for emerging writers, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Aurora Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. She was the Guest of Honor at the 2002 WisCon.

Shelley Jackson

Shelley Jackson is a writer and artist known for her cross-genre experiments, including the groundbreaking hypertext Patchwork Girl (1995). Her works deal with issues of the body, displacement, touch, and desire.

Born in the Philippines, Shelley Jackson grew up in Berkeley, California. She is the author of several hypertext novels, including Patchwork Girl, a non-chronological reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as the autobiographical My Body and The Doll Games, which she wrote with her sister Pamela. In 2001 she received the Electronic Literature Award.

Shelley Jackson’s short story collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, appeared in 2002. A year later, she launched the Skin Project, a novella published in the form of tattoos on the skin of volunteers. Her first novel, Half Life, won the 2006 Tiptree Award.

Mary Shelley, Honored Ghost

Mary Shelley is best known for her pioneering novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), often considered the first science fiction novel. She wrote the book while she was 18, unwed, and pregnant with her first child. Given that her own mother had died in childbed when Mary was only 11 days old, the terrors of pregnancy and childbirth are a powerful theme in the text. Her second novel, The Last Man, is also science fiction: it is a portrait of the end of the world from a plague in the 21st century.

Mary Shelley moved in the first intellectual circles of her day. Her father was the political theorist William Godwin; her mother, the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman; family friends included Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt. Before she turned 17 she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was married and the father of two children. Their friends included Lord Byron. She traveled widely and wrote several books about her journeys. Although her later books are overshadowed by the fame of Frankenstein, she continued writing novels, essays, poetry, and criticism throughout her life, as well as editing her husband’s papers. She died, aged 53, of a brain tumor.