George Alec Effinger is one of the most promising and prolific of the new breed of contemporary writers of speculative fiction. Since the appearance in 1972 of his acclaimed first novel, What Entropy Means to Me, Effinger has published nine more novels, three volumes of short stories, and numerous uncollected stories. In these works his ironic wit, his sense of the absurdity of the universe, his eye for concrete detail, and his parody of different styles have caused him to be compared to such writers as Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon.

Effinger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of George Paul and Ruth Uray Effinger. A National Merit scholar in high school, Effinger entered Yale in 1965 but soon dropped out to pursue full time his lifelong ambition to be a writer. He attended New York University in 1968 and Yale once again in 1969. He...