LibertyCon 25

Over a thirty year career, Don Maitz has produced imaginative paintings that have amazed a worldwide audience. The iconic pirate character he created for Captain Morgan Spiced Rum is his most widely recognized work.

Most Maitz paintings present a story to viewers, who respond to the enticement and allure of the image. Use of design and color shape a mood, enhanced by details which combine to entertain the viewer, and engage them with the visual experience. Most works are painted with oil colors, in the painting techniques used by the old masters. Sometimes, experimentation and innovation give rise to unique applications of traditional media.

Past clients have included the National Geographic Society, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Random House Publishers, Harper Collins Publishers, Watson Guptill, Warner Books, Sony Online Entertainment, Penguin USA, Joseph Seagrams and Sons, TV Guide, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers pictures. Maitz has twice won science fiction's Hugo award for best artist, a special Hugo for best artwork. He has received a Howard award, ten Chesley awards from his peers in the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA), an Inkpot award, a Silver Medal and certificates of merit from New York City's Society of Illustrators. Paintings have been exhibited at NASA's 25 Anniversary Show, in Cleveland OH, the Park Avenue Atrium, the Hayden Planetarium and the Society of Illustrators in New York City, NY, the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT, the Delaware Art Museum, DE, the Canton Art Museum, OH, the Florida International Museum and the South Florida Museum, FL.

Through her combined talents as a writer/illustrator, Janny has immersed herself in a lifelong ambition: to create a seamless interface between words and pictures that will lead reader and viewer into the imagination. Her lavish use of language invites the mind into a crafted realm of experience, with characters and events woven into a complex tapestry, and drawn with an intensity to inspire active fuel for thought. Her research includes a range of direct experience, lending her fantasy a gritty realism, and her scenes involving magic crafted with intricate continuity. A self-taught painter, she draws directly from the imagination, creating scenes in a representational style that blurs the edges between dream and reality. She makes few preliminary sketches, but envisions her characters and the scenes that contain them, then executes the final directly from the initial pencil drawing.

For more than three decades Vincent Di Fate has held an international reputation as one of the world's leading artistic visionaries of the future. People Magazine has said that he is "One of the top illustrators of science fiction, Di Fate is not all hard-edge and airbrush slickness. His works are always paintings — a bit of his brushwork shows — and they are all the better because of it." And Omni Magazine has made the observation that "Moody and powerful, the paintings of Vincent Di Fate depict mechanical marvels and far frontiers of a future technocracy built on complicated machinery and human resourcefulness. Di Fate is something of a grand old man in the highly specialized field of technological space art. Stirring images of far-flung environments have been his trademark." In his prolific career, he has produced art of science fiction, astronomical and aerospace subjects for such clients as IBM, The Reader's Digest, The National Geographic Society, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Di Fate has received many awards for his paintings, including the Frank R. Paul Award for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction Illustration (1978), the Hugo Award (Science Fiction Achievement Award) for Best Professional Artist (1979), the Skylark Award for Imaginative Fiction (1987), the Lensman Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Science Fiction Field (1990), and the Chesley Award from the Association of Science Fiction/Fantasy Artists for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (1998). He was also Guest of Honor at the 50th World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida in 1992 and has been an honored guest at numerous regional SF and fantasy conventions throughout the U.S. since the late 1960s.

Les Johnson is a NASA physicist, manager, author, husband and father. By day, he serves as the Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In his spare time he writes popular science books and articles, reads science fiction, and fulfills the role of husband and father to his two children.

Laurence van Cott Niven was born on April 30, 1938, in Los Angeles, California, and spent his childhood in Beverly Hills, "excluding two years (ages six to eight) in Washington, D.C., serving his country."

In 1956 he entered the California Institute of Technology, only to flunk out a year-and-a-half later after discovering a bookstore jammed with used science-fiction magazines. Larry finally graduated with a B. A. in mathematics (and a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas, in 1962, and completed one year of graduate work in mathematics at UCLA before dropping out to write. He made his first sale, "The Coldest Place," in 1964 for $25.

Larry's first published story, "The Coldest Place," appeared in the December 1964 issue of Worlds of If. It was set on the dark side of Mercury, then considered the coldest place in the solar system; unfortunately, scientists discovered that Mercury does indeed revolve with respect to the sun just about the same time that "The Coldest Place" saw print. Undeterred, Niven continued writing about the wonders of the universe for the next four decades, and shows no signs of stopping.

Some of his contemporaries, like David Brin, have jokingly accused Larry of mining out the territory so completely that there's nothing left for other writers to explore! There can be no doubt that hard-sf writers dominant in the 1980s, like Greg Bear, and some of those reaching for eminence at the turn of the century, like Paul J. McAuley, Roger MacBride Allen and Stephen Baxter (one of Larry's own favorites), owe much to the scope of Larry's inventiveness and that genre-defining sense of wonder that's firmly anchored in the real-world setting of science and technology.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana. Jerry E. Pournelle, Ph.D., earned his Bachelors in Psychology and Mathematics, his Masters in Experimental Statistics and Systems Engineering, and his Doctorates in Psychology and Political Science all from the University of Washington.

An excellent SF author, he's also a noted lecturer, consultant and computer columnist (senior consulting editor at BYTE Magazine) and chairs the Citizen's Advisory Council on National Space Policy and The Lunar Society, Inc. He has served as Advisor on Space Policy to the Republican Congressional Leadership and as a Board Member of the L-5 Society.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, British Interplanetary Society, Royal Astronomical Society and the Operations Research Society of America, he is also a Senior Member of the American Astronautical Society and the American Institute of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineers. He has served as a past President of the Science Fiction Writers of America and as Science Editor for Twin Circle Magazine and Galaxy SF, and as a columnist for Analog Science Fiction and Infoworld Magazine. His other writing associations include membership in the Author's Guild, National Association of Science Writers, Aviation/Space Writers' Association and the Mystery Writers of America.

He was the first winner of the John W. Campbell Award in 1974, and won the Evans-Freehafer Award in 1977, plus both the "Forrie" and the Inkpot Award (Comic Arts Professional Society) in 1979. He's had over a dozen nominations for Nebula and Hugo Awards. He was nominated for TABA in 1980.

Married in 1959 to Roberta Jane ne Isdell, he has four sons and one daughter. Currently resides in Studio City, California.

Eric Flint's writing career began with the science fiction novel Mother of Demons. With David Drake, he has collaborated on the six-volume Belisarius series, as well as a novel entitled The Tyrant. His alternate history novel 1632 was published in 2000, and has led to a long-running series with several novels and anthologies in print. He recently began a new alternate history series set in North America with 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War. In addition, he's written a number of science fiction and fantasy novels.

Flint graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968, majoring in history (with honors), and later received a masters degree in African history from the same university. Despite his academic credentials, Flint has spent most of his adult life as an activist in the American trade union movement, working as a longshoreman, truck driver, auto worker, steel worker, oil worker, meatpacker, glassblower and machinist. He has lived at various times in California, Michigan, West Virginia, Alabama, Ohio, and Illinois. He currently resides in northwest Indiana with his wife Lucille.