Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, A Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts.

Dr John Chu is Senior National Curator, Midlands (Pictures and Sculpture) at the National Trust. He specialises in 18th-century British and French painting and has published and lectured widely on the art of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. He previously worked at Tate on the Turner Bequest and has taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Reading.

Greg Egan is a computer programmer, and the author of many acclaimed science fiction novels.

He has won the Hugo Award as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Egan's short fiction has been published in a variety of places, including Interzone, Asimov's, Nature, and Tor.com. He lives in Australia.

S. L. Huang has a math degree from MIT and is a weapons expert and professional stuntwoman who has worked in Hollywood on Battlestar Galactica and a number of other productions.

Huang's short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016. She is the author of Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point.

Carole Johnstone’s award-winning short fiction has been reprinted in many annual 'Best of' anthologies in the UK and US. She lives in Argyll & Bute, Scotland, with her husband. Mirrorland is her debut novel.

Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a multiple Hugo winner, and a frequent finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards.

A professional puppeteer and voice actor, she spent five years touring nationally with puppet theatres. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters.

Seanan McGuire is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex and Locus Award-winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works.

She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.

She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor and author of both fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has written for Popular Science, Wired and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

She co-founded the science fiction website io9 and served as editor-in-chief from 2008-2015, and subsequently edited Gizmodo. As of 2016, she is tech culture editor at the technology site Ars Technica.

Laurie Penny is a writer and journalist. She writes for Vice, the Guardian and many other publications, is a columnist and Contributing Editor at the New Statesman magazine.

She was the youngest person to be shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing on her blog 'Penny Red'. She has reported on radical politics, protest, digital culture and feminism from around the world, working with activists from the Occupy movement and the European youth uprisings.

She has 160,000 followers on Twitter and in 2012 won the British Media Awards' 'Twitter Public Personality of the Year' prize. Laurie is a nerd, a nomad and an activist. She is thirty years old and lives in London

E. Lily Yu received the Artist Trust / LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her stories appear in venues from McSweeney's to Tor.com and in eleven best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. She has lived on both coasts and holds degrees from Princeton and Cornell.

Neon Yang (they/them) is a queer non-binary author based in Singapore. They have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Lambda Literary, Ignyte, and Locus Awards, and their work has been an Otherwise Award Honoree.

In previous incarnations, Neon was a molecular biologist, a science communicator, a writer for animation, games and comic studios, and a journalist for one of Singapore's major papers.