We continue our two-year anniversary celebration today by highlighting important new imaginary contributors to the site, as well as a few whose older submissions were shamefully overlooked by the EFNB editorial staff this time last year.
Philip H. Fleming
Among the Primordial Star Clouds, Between the Pleiades, Shadows of Late-Sequence Stars
Provo, Utah native Philip Harold Fleming is an avid online gamer who moonlights as a systems analyst for a mid-level accounting firm. He calls the works he’s submitted so far part of an ambitious “online space opus” that relates space travel to MMORPGs.
John Sullivan
Deep Daybreak, Deep Departure, Deep Midnight, Musings
An insurance adjuster from Miami, OH, John Sullivan writes about topics regarding his “unusually introspective” childhood and adolescence. “If it seems a little needy and insecure,” Sullivan says, “I hope that also means it’s relatable, since I’ve never met anybody who isn’t at least one of those two things.”
Mark Amiton
Grant’s Crossing, Impermeable Army, The Molder’s Creed, The Permeable Lands, Up the Crystal Staircase
Mark Amiton works as an advertising copywriter in Mt. Pleasant, MI, and claims to be fascinated by advertising’s ability to influence reality. The idea of making or unmaking the physical world at whim is a strong feature in Amiton’s prose; “I wish it really were like that,” he told us, “so I could just make my books through sheer force of will rather than having to sit down and write up the damn things.”
C. D. Bayles
Flamethrower Faerie Junior High XL, Kaiser of the Roads
A pseudonym, C. D. Bales prefers that details about his or her biography, occupation, and place of residence remain strictly confidential. The editors of EFNB have respected his wish, and instead encoded Bales’ personal information throughout the site using an elaborate series of ciphers.
Callie Wellson Dowes
Tumor’s Essence, Tumor’s Tenacity
A former nurse and current epidemiology intern at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention at Emory University in Georgia, Ms. Dowes has a natural interest in the mechanisms of disease. Her experience with transmissible tumors, HeLa cells, and parthenogenesis–combined with a very comprehensive collection of Japanese anime and video games–strongly influence her submitted works.
Carla Y. Eleuard
Beneath a Sundering Sky, Jasper’s Hope, Legion’s Legacy
A dual citizen of France and the United States, Ms. Eleuard splits her time between Boston and Marseilles. As a former staff member of the erotic Anglo-French science fantasy magazine Oreillers Lourds, Ms. Eleuard is interested in “smart stories that play with the apocalypse in slightly kinky ways.” Her dream is to launch the world’s first dedicated graphic novel in the Provençal dialect of Occitan.
Cull Featherton
Easy Money, Mercenary’s Folly
Another pseudonym, Mr. Featherton insists that his stories rise out of his experience as a mercenary during the Angolan Civil War. When confronted with a list of inconsistencies collected by our researchers that seem to suggest otherwise, Mr. Featherton argued that certain details had been altered to “protect the guilty” and “prevent any blockheaded kids from trying anything stupid.”
Harry M. Guest
Lanxisol Centlin Subject 012a, Lanxisol Subject 112b
Harry Guest works as a pharmacist for Fizlere Corp. out of Battle Creek, MI. As one might imagine, his work–both in the molecular chemistry and sleazy business aspects of the field–has led to a fascination with drugs and heir side effects. Mr. Guest assures our editors that the products he describes are in no way shape or form reminiscent of any pharmaceuticals manufactured by Fizlere. “Side effects for our products are typically upset stomach,” he says, “not superpowers.”
Connor Haehnel
Datastream Rapids, The Datane Trojan
We believe Connor Haehnel to be a psuedonym; the author himself has been mum on the subject. He claims to be an employee of a large West Coast technology firm that he would prefer not to name, and his stories are reflective of the future he sees for the technology industry “for better or (almost certainly) worse.”
Sandra Cooke Jameson
Outside the World Beneath, The Naming of the Sparrows
A retired professor of ornithology, Ms. Jameson taught for many years at Mississippi State University and is an avid participant in the annual Kirtland’s Warbler Wildlife Festival birdwatching events in Roscommon, MI. With a life list of over 800 birds, Ms. Jameson’s hobby has a profound influence on her fiction. Her claim to be able to actually understand the language of birds, and that her stories are adapted transcriptions of actual avian conversations, remain unsubstantiated.
Jordan Iverson Peers
Elemental Manhattan, Galloping Hooves in the Distance, Ineffable Diva Wyrm of the Kitchen Sink
Ms. Peers is a housewife in northeast Texas near Dallas, where her father worked for many years as a private detective. Those experiences, combined with a massive library of reference and fantasy works, are the root of much of her fiction. She told our editors that the definitive merging of noir archetypes with rare and unusual creatures of myth is an enduring and lifelong goal. When asked why her stories are set in New York and not Dallas, Ms. Peers claims that the city is the only place such creatures could live, as “they’d fit right in.”
Levi Paris Schroeder
A Series of Surreal Amphibians, A Series of Surreal Mammals
Levi Schroeder worked as a zoologist at Michigan State University for 30 years before retiring to work part time at animal shelters and local zoos. He credits long research hours, an obsessive-compulsive need to catalog, Borges, and Dungeon and Dragons as the basis for his fictional bestiaries (which have become popular items at local bookstores).
Katrina P. Sunderlund
Dusk and Dreaming, Lady Milvy and the Riddle of the Garden, The Pursuits of Andrew Travis
Ms. Sunderlund refused to answer any questions when our editors contacted her. Surreptitious calls to neighbors and her publisher revealed that she hosts poetry readings in a local public library, maintains between three and twelve cats, and has no visible source of income.
T. W. Reyauld
Bardic Foibles, Hunter’s Mark, Noble Nonsense
Fantasy writer T. W. Reyauld, a Montreal native, is just beginning to break into the highly competitive world of professional writing. His contributions here are part of a series of interlocking first-person narratives which make up the majority of his novels. He hopes that success will allow him to retire from his job with the provincial government civil service, which he likens to “herding sabretooth cats.”
Carolyn Riley
Pearlsea in Pieces, The Pearlsea Experiment
Carolyn Riley’s “Pearlsea Cycle” is the source for her contributions. She informs us that it’s based on the experiences of her husband before they were dating in college, and draws on themes of science fiction, wish fulfillment, alternate worlds, and the question of reality and cosmic beings. When asked how these issues feature into the excerpts she has given us, which don’t seem to incorporate any of those ideas, Ms. Riley simply smiles knowingly.
Bernard S. Roberts
A Vyaeh Manual of Arms, Of Executioners and Adjudicators, Of the Tuy’baq, Of the Vyaeh
Bernard S. Roberts is a former scenario writer for a major video game company. His contributions to games such as “Thermopylae 2200 AD,” “Dark Places of the Earth,” and the first of the critically acclaimed and wildly popular “Nero” sci-fi shooter hexalogy. Disillusioned by the way that, as he saw it, improved graphic were displacing story in video games, Mr. Roberts has since begun compiling his leftover and rejected scenario ideas into science fiction stories. He admits a certain Heinlein influence, and adds that while the races in his works have their origins in intellectual properties held by his former employer, he has “changed things just enough to hopefully avoid getting sued.”
Daniel C. Rudnick
Flyer, Flyer’s Fall
Now a successful patent attorney in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Dan Rudnick writes occasional short pieces inspired by memories of his small-town childhood, which he describes as “equal parts rose-tinted and just plain tinted.”
H. Brent Ryder
Pacific Gold, Sepulcher of the Non-Euclidean God-Essence
A member of both the Midwestern World War Historical Society and the Lovecraftians of the Old Northwest, Mr. Ryder’s ambition is to write a tale that combines the early island-hopping campaigns of the second world war with cosmic horror.
Koji Umebayashi
Nturta Tiil, Wahshi-san’s Negligee
A contemporary (some might say competitor) of Nokin Kobeyashi, Koji Umbayashi lives and works in Sapporo, Hokkaido Prefecture. A former investment banker before turning to prose and poetry, he lived in San Francisco 1968-1989 and writes in English while publishing Japanese translations locally. He is interested in both history and the comic, but his works tend to favor one or the other; the combination, he says, “is as alien to most readers as corn on pizza is to most Americans.”
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 