TitanCon 2022 Featured Participants:

Peadar Ó Guilín

In September 2007, Peadar Ó Guilín published his first novel, The Inferior, which the Times Educational Supplement called “a stark, dark tale, written with great energy and confidence and some arresting reflections on human nature.” It tells the story of Stopmouth and his family who must battle for survival in a world of tribal societies. To live they must hunt rival species or negotiate flesh-trade with those who crave meat of the freshest humankind. There is but one law: Eat or be Eaten.

The second book in the series, The Deserter (2011), continues Stopmouth’s journey as he attempts to understand The Roof and find the mysterious woman he loves who fell from it. The final book in the trilogy, The Volunteer (2013), is available as an eBook, or in print (only from Amazon).

Peadar put out another eBook called Forever in the Memory of God: And Other Stories in 2013. The collection comprises three stories; The First of Many (a novelette that Peadar read the opening chapter of at TitanCon 2013), Forever in the Memory of God and Fairy Gold.

The Call (2016), has been a huge success scoring numerous nominations for prestigious YA book prizes, and has won several awards including – Children’s Books Ireland, Children’s Choice Award 2017, ESFS Achievement Award for Best Work of Fiction 2017. It is a rich story mixing horror, survivalism and deep-rooted Irish mythology. The Wertzone has given The Call a great review and strongly recommends it.

What if you only had 3 minutes to save your own life and the clock is already counting down… Three minutes. Nessa, Megan and Anto know that any day now they wake up alone in a horrible land and realise they’ve been Called. Two minutes. Like all teenagers, they know that they’ll be hunted down and despite all their training only 1 in 10 will survive. One minute. And Nessa can’t run, her polio twisted legs mean she’ll never survive her Call, will she? Time’s up.

The Invasion, sequel to The Call and its climactic resolution, was released in March 2018 – and is being chomped up at a rate of knots by fans and critics alike – in fact, it was a finalist for the LodeStar award!

Peadar recently joined the Wild Cards collective and you can enjoy his contributions in  Knaves Over Queens and Three Kings, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass, respectively.

Peadar has also started his own podcast, bringing tales of beguiling woe to easily-perturbed listeners everywhere. This can be found on iTunes or via his website.

Peadar has proven a huge hit with the audience over the years, moderating Game of Thrones panels and hosting our Masquerade and Lovely Beard Competition in such hilarious style. Peadar is a gem in many ways, but not only for his impromptu coach tour storytelling prowess and great patience whilst people are silly – but also for his kindness, and his own con-running activities. He was instrumental in the creation of our growing literature tracks and connections with the Irish/Northern Irish writing scene. He is of TitanCon.

Pat Cadigan

Pat is a two-time winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for her novels Synners (won in 1992) and Fools (1995), a three-time Locus Award winner in three different categories – best short story for Angel (1988), best collection for Patterns (1990), and best novelette for The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi (2013), which also won the Hugo Award for best novelette at WorldCon 2013 in San Antonio.

Pat has been an active member of SFF fandom since 1976 when she joined the convention committee for MidAmeriCon, the 34th WorldCon, held in Kansas City. Pat worked for ten years at Hallmark writing greeting cards, often in perfect iambic pentameter. She sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 with her success encouraging Pat to become a full-time writer in 1987. She moved to the UK in 1996 and now lives in London.

Pat has been dubbed ‘the Queen of Cyberpunk’ but her novels defy such narrow categorisation. Her first novel, Mindplayers (1987), introduces what becomes the common theme to all her works – blurring the line between reality and perception by making the human mind a real explorable place. Her second novel, Synners (1991), expands upon the same theme and both feature a future where direct access to the mind is possible via technology. While her stories include many of the gritty, unvarnished characteristics of the cyberpunk genre, she further specializes in this exploration of the speculative relationship between technology and the perceptions of the human mind.

Her third novel Fools (1992) examines a near-future in which insertable memories and personalities are for sale. This was followed by the Doré Konstantin series, comprising Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish is Digital (2000). AR is not just a way of life, it turns out, but also of death, as homicide detective Doré Konstantin discovers when she is called upon to investigate the death of a young man in an artificial reality parlour.

Pat has written a huge number of short stories, many of which are included in three short story collections – Patterns (1989), Home By The Sea (1992) and Dirty Work (1993). Pat has also contributed short stories to the Wild Cards shared-universe edited by George RR Martin, including By Lost Ways in Wild Cards II: Aces High and Addicted to Love in Wild Cards V: Down and Dirty. If you are a fan of George’s work, but haven’t heard of Wild Cards, we highly recommend you check it out.

The award-winning novelette The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi was first published in the anthology Edge of Infinity (2012) and is also available in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (2013). The story is about a group of workers who live in the orbit of Jupiter, where they assist in ongoing scientific research. All the workers have “gone out for sushi” – that is, they have had themselves surgically converted into forms resembling marine life (the narrator is an octopus) in order to better function in microgravity. However, this transformation has also made them into a political underclass relative to the normal humans referred to as bipeds.

Pat had a busy end to 2018, with two new publications in just the month of November alone! Pat collaborated with beloved DC character Harley Quinn’s co-creator Paul Dini to create the definitive backstory for her in Harley Quinn: Mad Love. Pat is also responsible for the Alita Battle Angel prequel Iron City, and has also written the film novelisation. Looking to the future, we have it on good authority that Pat Cadigan is currently working on a super-secret project that we should be getting excited for…

Pat brings so much energy to TitanCon. She is universally loved by everyone and whether you’ve come across her before or not, you know you are in for a wild ride.

Ian McDonald

Ian is a science-fiction novelist best known for his BSFA award-winning and Hugo nominated novels River of Gods (2004), Brasyl (2007) and The Dervish House (2010). Ian won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for The Djinn’s Wife (2006). The novella Time Was (Tor.com) won the BSFA short fiction award for 2019.

Ian McDonald was born in 1960, in Manchester, to a Scottish father and Irish mother, but moved to Belfast when he was five, and has lived there ever since. He therefore lived through the whole of the ‘Troubles’ (1968-99), and his sensibility has been permanently shaped by coming to understand Northern Ireland as a post-colonial (and so, in his view, de facto ‘Third World’) society imposed on an older culture. He became a fan of SF from childhood TV, began writing when he was 9, sold his first story to a local Belfast magazine when he was 22, and in 1987 became a full-time writer.

Ian’s first, and Locus Award winning novel Desolation Road (1988) is set on a partially terraformed Mars. The novel outlines the history of a town called Desolation Road founded by a lone scientist and a collection of strays and castaways.

Major themes of Ian’s work include nanotechnology, post-cyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies. His 1990s Chaga Saga is particularly notable for its analysis of the AIDS crisis in Africa. River of Gods and it’s companion novel of short stories Cyberabad Days (2009) is set in mid-21st-century India. Brasyl is set in the 18th and 21st centuries in Lusophone South America. The Dervish House (2010) took us to Istanbul, Turkey in the year 2025 and centred on the families that live in and around its titular house, it is at once a rich mosaic of Islamic life in the new century and a telling novel of future possibilities.

Ian’s latest work is a trilogy of books that aim to do for the moon what his other work has done for India, Brazil and Turkey, which is to say write a thrilling story of the future that is rooted in the vivid realities of its location. The first book Luna: New Moon (2015) is described as Game of Thrones in space. It’s a tale of corporate blood-letting and deceit on a massive scale set on a moon that, for all its lethal harshness, is described with such richness that you feel what it would be like to live (and die) there.

Ian read an excerpt from Luna: New Moon at our Literature Night in 2014, and the excerpt he read from Luna: Wolf Moon in 2017 was such a crowd-pleaser that we all demanded he read the same excerpt again last year!

The final part of the trilogy Luna: Moon Rising, was published in 2019, followed by the related novella The Menace from Farside.

Ruth Frances Long

Ruth Frances Long writes young adult fantasy such as The Treachery of Beautiful Things (Dial, 2012) and The Dubh Linn trilogy set in the world of demons, angels and fairies that exists alongside our own in modern-day Dublin (A Crack in Everything, A Hollow in the Hills and A Darkness at the End (O’Brien, 2014-2016)). In 2015, she was the winner of The European Science Fiction Society Spirit of Dedication Award For Best Author of Children’s Science Fiction and Fantasy for A Crack in Everything.

As Jessica Thorne, she writes fantasy and space opera romance – The Queen’s Wing (Bookouture, 2018) and The Stone’s Heart (Bookouture, 2019, and Mageborn (Bookouture, 2020), first in a new series The Hollow King.

As R. F. Long, she writes fantasy & paranormal romance such as The Scroll Thief, Soul Fire and the Holtlands stories (The Wolf’s Sister, The Wolf’s Mate and The Wolf’s Destiny).

She lives in Ireland and works in a library of rare, unusual & occasionally crazy books. But they don’t talk to her that often.

Visit her website: www.rflong.com

Follow her on:

Twitter: @RFLong / @JessThorneBooks

Facebook: RuthFrancesLong

Instagram: ruthfranceslong