That little bit of dream is really just the kind of catalyst for all the rest of it. The other catalyst for it was really the fact that I have become so enamored of the wildlife and the wilderness of north Florida where I hike a lot, and so I’ve been wanting to write something with a setting that was like that for a while. That kind of combined in my imagination with the dream bits, and then the character came to me, and the situations that the character was in, and then I knew that I had a story.

Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to difficult films. From his hallucinatory feature debut PI to his metaphysical triptych fantasy THE FOUNTAIN, his cinematic worlds are often a hopeless personal struggle against overwhelming, even cosmic odds. The other theme to which he most often returns is that of all-consuming passion (be it ballet or wrestling, or—if you want to give in and get really dark—addiction).

Scott Sigler was the first author to start podcasting novels, and built up a huge online following that led to a five-book deal with Crown Random House. Two of his books are currently in development as TV shows. His new novel, PANDEMIC, the third book in the Infected trilogy, is out now.

Basically, when the story opens up, he gets an interesting contract offer to write a treatment for a movie, and then within a few days he gets a more sinister kind of proposal. There’s a knock on the door, and when he opens it, there’s a long, rectangular box, and inside it is a sniper rifle, exactly the kind he used in the war, with a little note saying, “Would you kill a really bad man for $100,000?”

Chris Hadfield is the first Canadian to walk in space, and also the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. Many of the videos he posted while in orbit became internet sensations, especially his zero-gravity rendition of the David Bowie song “Space Oddity,” which has been viewed over twenty million times on YouTube.

I’m a lit geek, always have been, and will probably always identify that way. I think that’s one of the things that at various points I was worried about. “Am I going too far into the lit geek world in a way that’s really alienating to other people?” That was another place where it was great to be working with J.J. and Lindsey, and having people saying, “No, this is interesting. Run with it. If it’s taking you to strange places, by all means. If it’s working, it’s working.”

Scott Lynch is the author of the World Fantasy Award nominee The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels, Red Seas Under Red Skies and The Republic of Thieves. His short fiction has been published in several anthologies and in Popular Science. His online serial Queen of the Iron Sands is available for free at his website, www.scottlynch.us. Born in Minnesota in 1978, Scott currently lives in Wisconsin.

Allie Brosh is the creator of the popular webcomic Hyperbole and a Half. The comic, which mostly deals with funny stories from the author’s childhood as well as touching on more serious subjects, like her ongoing battle with depression, is intentionally drawn to look like something a child would create using Microsoft Paint, and has a devoted following with almost 400,000 likes on Facebook. A print version entitled Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Stuff that Happened is out now.

I think utopia and dystopia are essentially flipsides of the same form, and that every utopia has a dystopia concealed within it. And every dystopia has got a utopia concealed within it, otherwise you wouldn’t have anything to judge the “bad” by.

I grew up overseas in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. This was before satellite TV, VCRs, and media globalization. This meant we relied almost entirely on books for entertainment, even while my age cohort was growing up as the second television generation. Because of living in odd places with limited resources, the reading material was often eclectic. I wound up with the reading habits and history of an SF fan ten or twenty years my senior, and virtually no television or movie viewing history at all.