Author Guest of Honor

{C.S. Friedman} will be joining us at ICON 31. Celia learned to read at an early age and could not get enough of it. By the age of 6, Celia was telling elaborate stories about the family in her drawings really being aliens. And by 14 she was laying the ground work for her first novel, “In Conquest Born”, by creating an interstellar universe complete with warring nations and a 10,000 year history in response to classmates disdaining her for being “a mere earthling.” This satisfied her classmates that, like them, she was truly and alien, and won her social acceptance.

In college Celia briefly studied math before switching to theater. More significantly, she discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism and the joy of spending her weekends in period costume. These two interests eventually combined into a MFA in costume design.

Her passion for the alien civilization she created as a child had not faded completely, and while working as an Assistant Professor of Costuming in Geneseo, NY, she scribbled short stories long into the night to work off her tension. The short stories lead to an all night writing frenzy, turning out 30 pages. She looked at them in the bleary light of dawn and read them again and thought, “Damn, this is good. This is good enough to sell.” (Chapter 11 of In Conquest Born). Since then Celia has written 6 more sci-fiction and fantasy novels, as well as, “The Erciyes Fragments”, a version of the Book of Nod (published by White Wolf) that has never been seen before by mortal eyes.

Celia quit her costume design career after having designed 100 shows for university and professional stages. Partly this was to have more time for writing, and partly it was to have some time for a social life. However she has discovered she is not happy alone in the house with her computer all the time, and has begun teaching a creative writing course at a local high school. It’s proving to be a wonderful balance of creative energy, and gives her the opportunity to spend time with some truly gifted teachers and exceptional young people. She also shares her life with Coco, a big black Angora that belonged to Celia’s mom, Shiva, a blue shorthair stray that she rescued in Winchester, and Tasha, an insatiably curious tabby-and-white Maine Coon who insists on being part of the writing process.

Artist Guest of Honor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

{Larry Price} was born in Frederick, OK, and raised in the Midwest. He has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Northern Illinois University. Currently Larry lives in DeKalb, IL and teaches computer graphics and film appreciation at Harper College in Palatine.

Although Larry has worked with a number of traditional media, since 1994 he has been working almost exclusively with computers. They create a unique form of dynamic interplay between the user and machine that he find fascinating.

Since he was young Larry has enjoyed reading Science Fiction; and it is exciting to create images from an imaginary future. His work has been published in Spectrum, the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art: Heavy Traffic Spectrum 8; Port of Call, Spectrum 9, Future 1, Spectrum 10; Spring, Spectrum 11.

Larry’s idea of Fantasy, unlike many artists, does not include the standard Sword and Sorcery” conventions; but rather, he sees it as involving Surrealistic or Symbolist ideas. You won’t see any dragons here, that is, unless he can figure out a non-clichéd way to do it.

After spending so much time in the digital world, Larry finds it nice to work with real materials in the physical world. His lamps are a whimsical celebration of technology. He has always been fascinated by the practical design of old scientific equipment, and the miscellaneous pseudo-scientific devices found in the laboratories of the 1930’s movies Flash Gordon and Frankenstein. In his lamp designs, he creates the appearance of a futuristic machine whose purpose is not clearly understood, a kind of retro-technology that might possibly be an antique from the future.