Photo © RC Matheson

IN KEEPING with our primary theme of "The Next Generation", we are delighted to welcome RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON and his legendary father RICHARD MATHESON as author Guests of Honour to World Fantasy Convention 2013.

RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON was born in 1953. He is a novelist, short story writer and screenwriter/producer. RC is also the president of Matheson Entertainment, a production company he formed with his father, which is involved with multiple film and television projects.

He began his career in the late 1970s as an advertising copywriter and writer for stand-up comedians. At twenty, he became the youngest writer ever signed to an overall deal with Universal Studios and was made story editor of the critically acclaimed Quincy M.E. He also wrote and co-wrote scores of episodes for The Incredible Hulk, Battlestar Galactica, Simon and Simon, Amazing Stories, The A-Team and many others. After leaving Universal, he worked as head writer and producer for comedy and dramatic series at every studio in Hollywood.

Matheson moved quickly into feature film writing, working with Steven Spielberg on Harry and the Hendersons and Three O'Clock High, a spec feature script he co-wrote that Spielberg bought. To date, he has written, co-written and sold over twelve spec screenplays—considered a record. Among his film credits are Full Eclipse, The Incredible Hulk, It Takes Two, Loose Cannons (which he wrote with his father) and Paradise.

Matheson has scripted three mini-series, including the four-hour Sole Survivor for the Fox network, based on Dean Koontz's best-selling novel; The Chronicles of Amber, a four-hour for the Syfy Channel based on Roger Zelazny's best-selling fantasy series, and the original Dragons, a six-hour for Matheson's producing partner Bryan Singer and the Syfy Channel. He also adapted the two-time Emmy Award-winning 'Battleground' episode for Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and three episodes of Masters of Horror.

Recent projects include co-creating/writing all thirteen episodes of HBO's half-hour comedy, Chemistry, and creating Majestic, a one-hour pilot he wrote for TNT, based on Whitley Strieber's best-selling novel. He also recently wrote and created Splatter, a web-based horror project for Roger Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and the web-series Shockers, which Matheson also directed. He is currently adapting H.G. Wells' The Time Machine as a four-hour mini-series for TNT.

Matheson is considered a master of the short-short story and has published more than seventy stories of psychological horror in magazines and major anthologies, including Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Year's Best Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Best Horror of the Year. Thirty of his critically acclaimed stories are collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks with a Foreword by Stephen King and an Introduction by Dennis Etchison. His second collection, Dystopia, gathers sixty stories with an Introduction by Richard Matheson and an Afterword by Peter Straub. The volume also includes tributes about RC's writing from Clive Barker, Ellen Datlow, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Jones, Ramsey Campbell and many others. Matheson's debut novel, Created By, was a Bram Stoker Award nominee and his magic-realism novella, The Ritual of Illusion, is available from PS Publishing.

Matheson edited a book about the television production of Stephen King's 'Battleground' for Gauntlet Publishing, and the same imprint has also published Pride, which illustrates the collaborative process between RC and his father on a short story.

He has worked as a paranormal investigator with the UCLA Department of Parapsychology on numerous cases, including the notorious house upon which the 1982 movie The Entity was based. He is also a professional drummer and studied with legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker. He has played with The Smithereens, Existers and Rock Bottom Remainders. His latest band, As Above So Below, was founded with guitarist and best-selling novelist p.g. sturges. Matheson is co-producing their debut album.

Photo © RC Matheson

"My dad loves your theme of the writing torch passed from father to son," explains Richard Christian Matheson, "and confessed he sees it that way between us... which is very moving to me. Given this, the World Fantasy Convention 2013 will be greatly meaningful to us and the perfect chance to catch-up with missed friends and colleagues we haven't seen forever."