William Gibson

Cayce Pollard is the fictional protagonist of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. Aged 32 during the events of the Pattern Recognition, Cayce lives in New York City. Though named by her parents after Edgar Cayce, she pronounces her given name "Case". She is a freelance marketing... consultant, a coolhunter with an unusual intuitive sensitivity for branding, manifested primarily in her physical aversion to particular logos and corporate mascots. A notable exception to her ability to immediately discern semiotic content in imagery is the succession of images of the September 11 attacks in 2001, for her "an experience outside culture". The attacks had added significance to Cayce's backstory in that they encompassed the disappearance of her father, Win, which in turn impelled her mother, Cynthia, to exploring electronic voice phenomena as her own means of diving patterns in the background static. Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" for her father until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.
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David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the... psychological is typically intertwined with the physical. In the first half of his career, he explored these themes mostly through horror and science fiction, although his work has since expanded beyond these genres. He has been called "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world." Born in Toronto, Canada, Cronenberg was the son of Esther , a musician, and Milton Cronenberg, a writer and editor. His family has been described as "a nurturing middle class family." He began writing as a child and wrote constantly. He attended high school at Harbord Collegiate Institute. A keen interest in science, especially botany and lepidopterology, led him to enter the Honours Science program the University of Toronto in 1963, but he switched to Honors English Language and Literature later in his first year.
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Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones and The Aleph , are compilations of... short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia . Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most... praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravity's Rainbow , and Mason & Dixon . Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr.
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Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays. First published in the 1960s, the particular interest of her work is exploring alternative... imaginings of sexuality, religion, politics, anarchism, ethnography and gender. She is influenced by the central figures Western literature, including feminist writers like Virginia Woolf, but also by modern fantasy and science fiction writers, Norse mythology, and books from the Eastern tradition such as the Tao Te Ching. In turn, she has had a influence on Booker prize winners and shortlisters like Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and notable writers of futurism and fantasy such as Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won awards such as the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and World Fantasy Award multiple times. Le Guin was born and raised in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber. In 1901, Le Guin's father earned the first Ph.D.
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