Rudy Rucker is an American science fiction writer, born March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky. Known for extravagantly playful fiction on mathematical themes, he has also written extensively about mathematics for popular and specialized audiences alike. Among his many novels are the Ware tetralogy (Software, 1982; Wetware, 1988; Freeware, 1997; Realware, 2000); White Light (1980), Spacetime Donuts (1982), Master of Space and Time (1984), Mathematicians in Love (2007), and Postsingular (2007). His nonfiction includes such works as Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977), Infinity and the Mind (1982), and The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy (2005). He is the great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction writer, born in Brownsville, Texas on April 14, 1954. His first published fiction appeared in the late 1970s, but he came to real prominence in the early 1980s as one of several writers associated with the "cyberpunk" tendency, and as that movement's chief theoretician and pamphleteer. He also edited the anthology Mirrorshades (1986), which still stands as a definitive document of that period in SF. His novel Islands in the Net (1988) won the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year; he has also won two Hugo awards, for the stories "Bicycle Repairman" (1996) and "Taklamakan" (1998). His 1990 collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, was an important work of early steampunk/neo-Victoriana. His latest novel is The Caryatids (2009). In 1992 he published The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, heralding a second career as a journalist covering social, legal, and artistic matters in the digital world. The first issue of Wired magazine, in 1993, featured his face on its cover; today, their web site hosts his long-running blog, Beyond the Beyond.
