San José State University

Michael Whelan is an American artist of imaginative realism. For more than 30 years he worked as an illustrator specializing in science fiction and... fantasy cover art. Since the mid-1990s he has pursued a fine art career, selling non-commissioned paintings through galleries in the United States and through his website. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Whelan in June 2009, the first living artist so honored. According to his Hall of Fame citation, Michael Whelan is one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism. His paintings have appeared on the covers of more than 350 books and magazines, including many Stephen King novels, most of the Del Rey editions of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series, the Del Rey edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series, Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince and Dragon Star series, the DAW editions of Michael Moorcock's Elric books, numerous DAW editions of C. J.
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Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of... the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb. Rucker was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Rucker attended St. Xavier High School before earning a B.A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College, and a Master's and Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University. Rucker taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo from 1972–1978. Thanks to a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Rucker taught math at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg from 1978–1980. He then taught at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1980–1982, before trying his hand as a full-time author for four years.
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