As the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) for 25 years, Edward L. Ferman published consistently high-quality fiction and non-fiction, and nurtured the early careers of leading science fiction, fantasy and horror authors. Ferman exhibited a steady hand running a magazine and a keen eye for first-rate stories. He published the early work of many distinguished authors including Dean Koontz, James Tiptree, Jr., John Varley, and Karen Fowler. Among many notable works, he published Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," and he serialized the first volume of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. During Ferman's tenure, F&SF carried science articles by Isaac Asimov, film columns by Harlan Ellison and cartoons by Gahan Wilson. Some the best artists in the genre, such as Ed Emshwiller and Chesley Bonestell, painted covers for the magazine. F&SF won four Best Magazine Hugo Awards, and Ferman himself won three Hugos for Best Editor and a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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Michael Whelan is one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work marked a return of genre book covers to realism. His art, though, is more intricate and naturalistic—despite the otherworldly subjects—than that of his pulp-era predecessors. After college Whelan received steady commissions from publishers including DAW, Ace, Del Rey, and Marvel Comics. He painted covers for a number of important novel series such as Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels. His painting for McCaffrey's best-selling The White Dragon gained him national attention, and in 1980 he won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist. He captured that award the next 6 years running, and took 6 more after that. Among his many notable works are covers for 2010: Odyssey Two by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, and Stephen King's The Dark Tower.
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Frank Rudolph Paul was the founding father of science fiction art, and his work defined the look of the future as seen in the early pulp fiction magazines. In 1914, Hugo Gernsback hired Paul  to create covers and illustrations for The Electrical Experimenter. Paul later provided all the covers and interior illustrations for Amazing Stories' first three years, starting in 1926, and went on to do work for a number of other pulps. Drawing on his architectural training, Paul specialized in enormous cities and vehicles, and his work is known for its bright, basic colors. He painted more than 200 magazine covers as well as countless interior illustrations. In 1939 he was guest of honor at the first World Science Fiction Convention. That was the year he also painted the cover of Marvel Comics #1. He continued to be Hugo Gernsback's go-to artist up to and including Gernsback's last magazine, Science-Fiction +, (1952-1953).
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Connie Willis is one of the most award-winning authors of speculative fiction to date, with Hugo and Nebula Award wins in all fiction categories. Her writing often resides in areas of "soft" science fiction, but she also explores hard science fiction settings such as interstellar travel. Willis' first solo novel, Lincoln's Dreams (1987) won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her second novel, Doomsday Book (1992), brought her even more attention, winning both a Hugo and Nebula Award. 1998's To Say Nothing of the Dog, another Hugo winner, blends science fiction with comedy of manners as a historian from the future bounces between the Victorian era and the Blitz. Time travel is a favorite Willis theme, also the intersections of film and reality, as seen in Remake (1994), and Christmas tales. CBS adapted Willis' novella "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" into the movie Snow Wonder in 2005.
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