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CoastCon XXXII
Guests
NEW GUESTS
SIGNED:
Author
Guests
David Weber -- Guest
of Honor
Michael Moorcock -- Guest of
Honor
Chris Roberson
Mark L. Van
Name
Tom Trumpinski
Laurel Anne
Hill
Artist
Guests
John Picacio -- Guest
of Honor
Steven
Butler
Gaming
Guests
Larry Brom -- Guest of
Honor
Ken Burnside
Publishing Guests
Matt
Staggs
Fan Guest
AJ
Brockway -- Guest of Honor
Fan Guest of Honor
AJ
Brockway
Author
Guests
Guest
of Honor
David Weber
 David Weber's
works are a fusion of Napoleonic naval and high
tech futurism that have a healthy dose
of good old fashioned space opera and a subtle
touch politics and intrigue.
His most
popular series are the Honor Harrington series
that span main books and four others that take
place in that universe as well as three other
related books. He has also written the highly
popular 1632 series with Eric Flint that is a
time travel book, where a small town bounces
back in time to a Europe of 1632 with
interesting consequences. As a side note this
book has been made into a RPG by our own Michael
Scott, who might let you play if you ask him
nicely. Not stuck in the past, however, his use
of a strong female lead character in the Honor
Harrington series shows a forward-thinking
mental flexibility. His study of history coupled with a
hard-science and methodical application with an
appreciation of the past, makes his works
enjoyable and well-rounded forays into the
possible futures of
mankind.
Guest of
Honor
Michael Moorcock
 In 2008, Michael
Moorcock was named SFWA Damon Knight Memorial
Grand Master of Science Fiction. He is a
recipient of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy
Award and Prix Utopiales Lifetime Achievement
Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and
Fantasy Hall of Fame, a four-time winner of the
August Derleth Fantasy Award, and a two-time
winner of the British Fantasy Award. His
works have also received the John W. Campbell
Memorial, the World Fantasy, Guardian Fiction
and Nebula Awards. His literary novel Mother
London was shortlisted (with Rushdie and
Chatwyn) for the Whitbread Prize in
1986.
Moorcock was born in London ,
England in 1939. He has been writing most
of his life in most genres, from contributions
to Tarzan Adventures at the age of
16 (and position as editor at 17) until today,
including the Metatemporal Detective
published in 2007. The Metatemporal
Detective features a cover by this year’s
CoastCon Artist Guest of Honor John Picacio who
has also illustrated throughout the newest
edition of Elric: The Stealer of
Souls. Married to a
Mississippian, he has even written fiction set
in an alternate universe of CoastCon’s hometown
of Biloxi along the “Biloxi Fault,” a rift in
reality which threatens the world.
However, Moorcock is best known
for his stories and novels centered on the
“Eternal Champion,” a figure of many
incarnations in many universes all of which are
part of one cosmic entity. The best known
of the Eternal Champions is Elric of Melnibone,
an albino sorcerer-king who wields (or is
wielded by) a soul-devouring sword known as
Stormbringer, itself a part of the same cosmos
spanning entity. Elric first appeared in
the early 1960’s and has continued to figure in
stories and novels by Moorcock and others to
this day.
Although primarily a writer of
fiction with some poetry and non-fiction to his
credit, Moorcock has also had a career as rock
musician and songwriter. As a collaborator
with the band Hawkwind, he appears on numerous
albums. He has also has three songwriting
credits with Blue Öyster Cult and has performed
with the band on stage.
CoastCon 32 is proud to have
Michael Moorcock as one of its two Author Guests
of Honor. He currently splits each year
between homes in Bastrop , Texas and Paris,
France with his wife Linda and two
cats.
Chris
Roberson
 Chris Roberson’s
novels include Here, There &
Everywhere, The Voyage of Night Shining
White, Paragaea: A Planetary Romance,
X-Men: The Return, Set the Seas on Fire,
The Dragon’s Nine Sons, and the
forthcoming novels End of the Century,
Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, and Three
Unbroken and the comic book mini-series
Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love. His
short stories have appeared in such magazines as
Asimov’s, Interzone,
Postscripts, and Subterranean, and
in anthologies such as Live Without a
Net, FutureShocks, and Forbidden
Planets.
Along with his business
partner and spouse Allison Baker, he is the
publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent
publishing house specializing in genre fiction
and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the
editor of anthology Adventure Vol. 1.
He has been a finalist for the World
Fantasy Award four times—once each for writing
and editing, and twice for publishing—twice a
finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best
New Writer, and three times for the Sidewise
Award for Best Alternate History Short Form
(winning in 2004 with his story “O One”).
Chris and Allison live in Austin,
Texas with their daughter Georgia. Visit him
online at www.chrisroberson.net.
Mark L. Van
Name
 Mark L. Van Name is the
author of the novels One Jump Ahead, its
sequel Slanted Jack. He is also the
editor, with Toni Weisskopf, of the anthology
Transhuman. His stories can also be found
in the anthologies Future Weapons of War
and The Best of Jim Baen’s Universe II.
John Ringo predicted of Mark, he is “going to be
the guy to beat in the race to the top of
SFdom.” A former Executive Vice President for
Ziff Davis Media and national technology
columnist, he’s published over a thousand
computer-related articles and multiple science
fiction stories in a variety of magazines and
anthologies, including the Year’s Best Science
Fiction.
Along with his
career as a writer, Mark has worked in the
high-tech industry for over thirty years and
today runs a technology assessment company in
the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. He
considers his company, Principled Technologies,
to be the finest technology assessment company
in the world and is proud to be a part of
it.
Tom
Trumpinski
 Tom Trumpinski was born in 1952,
the son of a Lithuanian-immigrant war-hero
farmer and a 4'10" torch singer. He was five
years old when Sputnik was launched and, as a
result, was hand-picked for the educational
fast-track to engineering and the sciences. He
was (and still is at heart) a farm boy, who grew
up in the little town of Tonica, Illinois,
population 750.
At 14,
after watching an episode of the original
Star
Trek involving Klingon
battle-cruisers, he invented differential
calculus over the next three weeks—including a
complete new symbolism, since he had formally
studied neither algebra nor geometry and had to
discover the axioms necessary to derive the
proper results. He was crushed when he took his
new discovery to his general science teacher and
found that Newton and Leibniz had already done
this three centuries before.
In
1970, he entered the University of Illinois
College of Engineering under a program in which
poor children with high ACT scores had their
tuition and fees paid by the State of Illinois.
While he was there, he became a techno-hippie,
which he remains to this day. After college, he
worked in a manufacturing plant to support his
wife and new daughter, working his way up from
the assembly line to the head of Quality
Assurance for the factory in 8 1/2
years.
After the plant closed during the
'82 recession, he became a contractor for the
Department of Energy and working at the U of I
and Fermilab, he ran the construction teams
which built the majority of the muon detector
coverage for the Collider Detector at Fermilab,
which was activated in 1986 and discovered the
Top Quark in 1995.
After a brief stint at
the Supercollider in the Dallas area, he
returned to the Champaign area and was the
laboratory supervisor for the General Chemistry
accelerated freshman classes until January,
2008, when he retired to become a full time
author.
Hobbies include RPG tabletop and
computer gaming, reading, philosophy, and being
a curmudgeon. He lives with his three wives and
husband in a wonderful house in Champaign. They
have seven cats and a dog. He plans to dedicate
the rest of his life to writing, gaming, and
love.
Riding the
Hell-bound Train is his
first book and available from Peregrination
Press. Tom’s website is www.TomTrumpinski.com.
Laurel Anne
Hill
 Laurel Anne Hill is the author of
Heroes Arise which
recieved a ForeWard Magazine Book of
the Year Award (bronze, science fiction
category) of 2007 and was a Next Generation
Indie Book Award finalist in the young adult
category. Her short fiction and nonfiction
has appeared in a number of publications (eg.
Space and Time, Lynx Eye, the
San Jose Mercury News, the Contra
Costa Times, Fertility and
Sterility).
Laurel holds
both a B.A. and a M.S. degree in biology.
Her professional background as a former
biologist includes 27 years in the
pharmaceutical industry and technical
writing. Her website can be found at www.LaurelAnneHill.com.
Artist Guests
Guest of Honor
John
Picacio
John Picacio was
born on the 3rd of September, 1969 in San
Antonio, Texas. As of 2008, he still lives and
works in San Antonio, together with his wife,
Traci. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture
degree from the University of Texas at Austin in
1992, and illustrated his first book - Behold
the Man: The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition by
Michael Moorcock (Mojo Press) - in 1996. In May,
2001 he ended his career in architecture to
became a full-time illustrator.
His early work
featured in many annuals and art compendiums,
including Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary
Fantastic Art, as well as magazines such as
Realms of Fantasy.
Picacio has since
produced design work and - particularly - cover
art for many notable SF, Fantasy and Horror
books printed by many different publishers, from
some of the longest-established and largest
American SF&F imprints (Random
House/Ballantine Books/Del Rey;
HarperCollins/Eos; Roc Books; Tor Books), to
more recent, independent publishers (Golden
Gryphon Press; MonkeyBrain Books; Night Shade
Books; Earthling Publication and
iBooks).
Picacio cites a
"mutual respect" between himself and his art
directors, who tend to give him "space to
create" his artwork, which he sees as part of an
interaction with the reader, "communicating with
a smart and sophisticated audience". He works
particularly well with fellow-Texan Roberson
(author and MonkeyBrain publisher), and the
editorial director of Prometheus Books' science
fiction imprint Pyr Lou Anders. He has provided
covers for several of Roberson's solo efforts -
from one of his earliest self-published titles,
the 2002 Clockwork Storybook title Any Time at
All to his 2007 X-Men novel - as well as
providing dozens of covers for almost the entire
output of MonkeyBrain Books. For Anders, Picacio
has provided covers for several anthologies from
multiple companies since Wildside Press's 2001
Outside the Box.
Picacio's
illustrations have been selected numerous times
for Cathy and Arnie Fenner's prestigious
Spectrum Annual, the yearly "Best in
Contemporary Fantastic Art" showcase for fantasy
and sci-fi art, which both honours established
artists and provides a resource for art
directors and illustrators to refer to. In 2001
and 2006, he was awarded the International
Horror Guild Award for Best Artist, and was
Artist Guest of Honor at the 2003
ArmadilloCon.
In 2005, he won
both the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist and
the Chesley Award for Best Paperback Cover (for
James Tiptree Jr.'s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever).
In 2006 he won the Chesley Award for Artistic
Achievement and in 2007 the Locus Award for Best
Artist. He has also received Hugo Award
nominations for Best Professional Artist in
2005, 2006 and 2007
His work has also
appeared on innumerous award-winning and
nominated titles, including Jess Nevins's
Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and the
Chris Roberson-edited anthology Adventure Vol.
1, both from MonkeyBrain.
In February, 2008,
Picacio's work was shown fully-illustrating (and
covering) Michael Moorcock's Elric The Stealer
of Souls, as the first in a new series of trade
paperback editions of Moorcock's Elric novels
published by Ballantine/Del Rey. Picacio's work
in the first volume will be followed (in Elric
To Rescue Tanelorn) by that of notable
illustrator M. W. Kaluta, placing him in
ever-more illustrious company.
Steven
Butler
 Steven Butler is a local (to
the Biloxi area) artist who has worked in
the comic book industry for several decades. He
is known both for penciling the Archie Comics series
Sonic the Hedgehog as well as creating
new designs for the familiar Archie characters
in 2007.
Butler's
work ranges from inking and providing occasional
cover duties for Cat and Mouse to
superhero illustrations in the original Silver
Storm mini-series to publications such as
Marvel Comics' Web of Spider-Man and Silver
Sable. The independent comic The
Badger by First
Comics served to launch his
career, but his work at Silverline comics
preceded Badger.
Butler has
also been involved in several Christian comics
projects. From 1999 to 2007 Butler worked on the
PowerMark comic series from Powermark
Productions. In 1999 he also illustrated 3
tracts for wrestler George
South entitled The
Greatest Match Ever, Who is Your Tag-Team
Partner?, and Who Are You Wrestling
Against?, packaged by The Nate Butler Studio
and published by PowerMark Productions. In 2005
he pencilled the Welcome to Holsom series
published by Radiant Life (Gospel Publishing
House).
In 2007,
Butler redesigned the Archie
Comics characters to be more
realistic. These designs did not replace the
familiar cartoony Dan
DeCarlo/Bob Montana look, but
are being used alongside the traditional designs
for special projects. The first story to use the
designs was Bad Boy Trouble which Butler
also drew, and the second was The
Matchmakers which was drawn by Joe Staton.
Gaming
Guests
Guest of Honor
Larry
Brom
A 78 year old
ardent War Gamer and rules designer, Larry Brom
started war gaming as we know it today, in 1956
after serving seven and a half years in the U.
S. Marine Corp, including a tour in Korea in
1950 ad a 20 year old infantry squad leader in
the 5th Marines. He went into Pusan with the
First Brigade in combat down south, and landed
at Wolmi-Do on the morning of the Inchon
Landing. He participated in the assault crossing
of the Han River and ended up wounded on Hill
296 overlooking Seoul.
He wrote his first
set of rules (unpublished Napoleonic) in 1958,
since those few sets that existed at the time
did not suit his views of war gaming with
miniature figures on a tabletop.
He published
The Sword and The Flame colonial rules in
1979 and since that time has written and
published a TSATF Scenario Portfolio, a 20th
Anniversary Edition of TSATF, some 5 or 6 TSATF
variants, and 8 rules sets for other periods.
Included among these are Chassepot and
Needlegun (1870), A Glint of Bayonets
(1863), Disperse, Ye Damned Rebels
(1778) and With Ol' Gimlet Eye
(Nicaragua 1912 - 1930), just to name a
few.
His latest rules
endeavour is a series of Fast Play Rules for
gaming conventions to allow for "big battles"
using 800 to 1200 30mm figures and finishing
games in half the time that the current rules
take to play.
Brom currently lives in New
Orleans with his two adult daughters, a 5' x 11'
game table (in his bed room --- he sleeps on a
cot!) and 5000 or so "troops".
Ken
Burnside
Ken Burnside has
worked in the Adventure Games industry since
1991, and worked for most of the companies that
produce science fiction products at one time or
another as a playtester or freelance
contributor. Ad Astra Games was founded in 2000
to publish his own designs and he has been
working for Ad Astra since 2003. He's also an
encyclopedia author and regular contributor in
the military simulations community.
Ken's boardgame designs are
reknowned for packing lots of scientific
accuracy into suprisingly playable 3-D packages,
and range from the "Honorverse" (Saganami Island
Tactical Simulator) to hard science (Attack
Vector: Tactical) and flexible cinematic
(Squadron Strike). He has won the Origins Award
once and has also been a finalist.
Ken has also designed
Roleplaying Games, from the D6 Dramatics engine
used by Ad Astra Games for its liscensed
properties to Minimus, a complete roleplaying
game in two pages. (The expanded version of
Minimus has an additional few pages of GMing
advice, but the actual rules of the game fit in
TWO PAGES!)
You'll be able to find Ken
in the gaming hall teaching people how to blow
up chocolates, or doing a few panels with David
Weber.
Publishing
Guest
Matt Staggs
A publicist
specializing in book and author publicity, Matt
Staggs has worked with established authors like
Jeff VanderMeer, Thomas M. Disch, and Nancy A.
Kress, as well as talented up-and-comers like
fantasists Paul Jessup and Ekaterina Sedia,
podcasting authors Mur Lafferty, Matthew Wayne
Selznickand Van Allen Plexico, and horror author
Z. A. Recht. In 2008 he lkaunched Deep Eight,
LLC, a boutique publicity agency utilizing the
best publicity practices from the worlds of
traditional media and evolving social
technoloigies.
Fan Guests
Guest
of Honor
A.J. Brockway
Long time active
fan, D&D game master, former chairman of
CoastCon, staff member for Mobicon, A. J.
Brockway is the Fan Guest of Honor for CoastCon
32. A. J. is a member of the Flaming Fen
the Porno Patrol, and much much
more.
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