Peter S. Beagle (American fantasy author) was born on April 20, 1939

Peter Soyer Beagle is an American author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays, especially fantasy fiction. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968), a fantasy novel he wrote in his twenties, which Locus subscribers voted the number five “All-Time Best Fantasy Novel” in 1987. During the last twenty-five years he has won several literary awards including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011. In 2005 Beagle published a coda to The Last Unicorn, a novelette entitled Two Hearts, and began work on a full-novel sequel. Two Hearts won the most prestigious annual awards, the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2006 and the parallel Nebula Award in 2007. It was also nominated as a short fiction finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Beagle also received a special Inkpot Award in 2006 for Outstanding Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and in 2007 the inaugural WSFA Small Press Award for “El Regalo”, published in The Line Between (Tachyon Publications). IDW Publishing released a six-issue comic book adaptation of The Last Unicorn beginning in April 2010. The collected hardcover edition was released in January 2011, premiering at #2 on the New York Times Hardcover Graphic Novel bestseller list. It will be followed by an adaptation of A Fine and Private Place.

Edgar Wright (English film and television director and writer) was born on April 18, 1974

Edgar Howard Wright is an English film and television director and writer. He is most famous for his work with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost on the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the TV series Spaced, and for directing the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and co-writing Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin with Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat (the writer of Doctor Who and Sherlock). Wright was born in Poole, Dorset, but grew up predominantly in Wells, Somerset, after his family moved there during his childhood. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wright directed many short films, first on a Super-8 camera which was a gift from a family member and later on a Video-8 camcorder won in a competition on the television programme Going Live. These films were mostly comedic pastiches of popular genres, such as the super hero-inspired Carbolic Soap and Dirty Harry tribute Dead Right (the latter of which was eventually featured on the DVD release of Hot Fuzz).

George Adamski (philosopher, teacher, student, and saucer researcher) was born on April 17, 1891

George Adamski was a Polish-born American citizen who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he claimed to have photographed ships from other planets, met with friendly Nordic alien “Space Brothers”, and to have taken flights with them. The first of the so-called contactees of the 1950s, he styled himself to be a “philosopher, teacher, student and saucer researcher”, though his claims were met with skepticism. Adamski had previously written a science fiction book in 1949 with a space travel theme, Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus, published by Leonard-Freefield Co of Los Angeles. In 1953 he took some of the fictional material from that book and presented it as fact within the best selling Flying Saucers Have Landed, co-written with Desmond Leslie.

Seth Rogen (Canadian comedian, actor, director, and screenwriter) was born on April 15, 1982

Seth Rogen is a Canadian stand-up comedian, actor, producer, director, screenwriter, and voice artist. Rogen began his career doing stand-up comedy during his teen years, winning the Vancouver Amateur Comedy Contest in 1998. While still living in his native Vancouver, Rogen landed a small part in Freaks and Geeks. Shortly after Rogen moved to Los Angeles for his role, Freaks and Geeks was officially canceled after one season due to poor ratings. Rogen later got a part on the equally short-lived Undeclared, which also hired him as a staff writer. After landing his job as a staff writer on the final season of Da Ali G Show, for which Rogen and the other writers received their Emmy Award nomination, Rogen was guided by film producer Judd Apatow toward a film career. Rogen was cast in a major supporting role and credited as a co-producer in Apatow’s directorial debut, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. After Rogen received critical praise for his performance, Universal Pictures agreed to cast him as the lead in Apatow’s directorial feature films Knocked Up and Funny People. Rogen and his comedy partner Evan Goldberg co-wrote the films Superbad, Pineapple Express, and The Green Hornet. Rogen has done voice work for the films Horton Hears a Who!, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Paul. Rogen married fellow screenwriter Lauren Miller in October 2011.

Bruce Sterling (American science fiction author) was born on April 14, 1954

Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre. Sterling is, along with William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Pat Cadigan, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, as well as its chief ideological promulgator, and one whose polemics on the topic earned him the nickname “Chairman Bruce”. He was also one of the first organizers of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, and is a frequent attendee at the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop. He won Hugo Awards for his novelettes Bicycle Repairman and Taklamakan.

David Langford (British science fiction author) was born on April 10, 1953

David Rowland Langford is a British author, editor and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible. As a writer of fiction, Langford is noted for his parodies. A collection of short stories, parodying various science fiction, fantasy fiction and detective story writers has been published as He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003, incorporating the earlier and much shorter 1988 parody collection The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two). Two novels, parodying disaster novels and horror, respectively, are Earthdoom! and Guts!, both co-written with John Grant. The novelette An Account Of A Meeting With Denizens Of Another World 1871, is an entertaining account of a UFO encounter, as experienced by a Victorian, but is notable chiefly for the framing story, in which Langford claimed to have found the manuscript in an old desk (the story’s narrator, William Robert Loosley, is a genuine ancestor of Langford’s wife). This has led some UFOlogists to believe the story is genuine (including the US author Whitley Strieber, who referred to the 1871 incident in his novel Majestic). Langford freely admits the story is fictional when asked — but, as he notes, “Journalists usually don’t ask.”

John C. Dvorak (technology columnist and broadcaster) was born on April 5, 1952

John C. Dvorak is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines. Dvorak is also the Vice-President of Mevio (formerly PodShow) and well known for his work for Tech TV. John Charles Dvorak was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in history, with a minor in flugelhorn, and has homes in the San Francisco Bay area and Port Angeles, in Washington State. He is married to Mimi Smith-Dvorak. Dvorak is a noted collector of Bordeaux wines and has been a tasting judge at various international events. He started his career as a wine writer. Dvorak obtained a technician class amateur (ham) radio license, callsign KJ6LNG, in November 2010. Dvorak was on the start-up team for CNET Networks, appearing on the television show CNET Central. He also hosted a radio show called Real Computing on NPR, as well as a television show on TechTV (formerly ZDTV) called Silicon Spin. He now appears on Marketwatch TV and is a regular panelist on This Week in Tech, a podcast audio and now video program hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring other former TechTV personalities such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and Robert Heron. As of December 2005, that “TWiTcast” regularly ranks among the top 5 at Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Dvorak also participated in the only Triangulation podcast, a similar co-hosted technology discussion program. In March 2006, Dvorak started a new show called CrankyGeeks in which he led a rotating panel of “cranky” tech gurus in discussions of technology news stories of the week. The last episode (No. 237) aired on September 22, 2010. Mevio hired Dvorak as Vice President & Managing Editor for a new Mevio TECH channel in 2007. He manages content from existing Mevio tech programming as well as hosts the show, “Tech5”, where Dvorak discusses the day’s tech news in approximately 5 minutes. Dvorak also co-hosts a podcast with Mevio co-founder Adam Curry called No Agenda. The show is a free flowing conversation about the week’s news, happenings in the lives of the hosts and their families, and restaurant reviews from the dinners John and Adam have together when they are in the same city (usually San Francisco). Adam usually has more outlandish opinions of the week’s news or world events while Dvorak plays the straight man in the dialogue.