Plugs

If you’re reading this at or soon after the time it posts on Monday morning, then I’ve likely somehow staggered into the office at the DayJob after a phenomenal but exhausting weekend as one of the GOHs at Confluence in Pittsburgh, PA. Which, of necessity, involved a long car trip to carry me back the roughly 300 miles from the west end of the state to the east, before I could sleep in my own bed last night. This is not a complaint. As I’ve remarked many times before, I think my life is pretty blessed. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that time is laughing at most of us, and especially so at me, as in two days I leave for my third convention in three weeks.

Meantime though, let’s talk about EATING AUTHORS (you know the first words up there on the top of the page) and more specifically this week’s guest, Todd J. Mccaffrey. It’s a pretty safe bet that you’re familiar with the family name. It’s hard to imagine anyone involved in speculative fiction today who hasn’t read Pern. Todd, quite understandably picked up a lot of his writing skill from working with his mother, and soon was both collaborating on Pern novels, as well as penning a few on his own, and carrying on the family business. He also written a wide range of shorter works. And just this past May branched out with a powerful new novel, City of Angels, an edgy science thriller that asks some very human questions about what it means to be an A.I.

Todd may have started with dragons and thread, but he’s clearly going his own direction with a distinct and powerful voice.

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As you know, Bob, my novel, Barsk, is anthropomorphic science fiction. And while I bristle when people attempt to describe it as “Babar in space,” the intention behind it is a fair one. It’s drawing on what they already know. After all, people have been reading about talking animals for a very long time. Somewhere along the line the animals started doing more previously human-only things (e.g., using tools, building cities, baking cakes, writing literary criticism), and this inevitable slide turned into what in today’s market constitutes “anthropomorphic” fiction.

This week’s EATING AUTHOR guest, Mary E. Lowd, is a popular writer and editor in a subgenre ghetto that gets very little attention from the daily reader of more traditional science fiction and fantasy. It’s arguably something of a niche market, and primarily served by a handful of very focused small presses. But for all that, it’s a thriving market and Mary’s done quite well there. She’s won the Ursa Major Award as well as two Cóyotl Awards for her own work, and has edited several of the best anthologies in the field. She also put otters in space long before I did.

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A couple days from now my life gets a bit crazy. I’ll be starting a period of time (let’s call it five weeks) in which I attend four conventions (the qep’a’ cha’maHwejDIch, Confluence, GenCon Writer’s Symposium, and after a week’s break, the WorldCon). Or to put it another way, I’m looking at 23 days away from home out of 35, and that’s a bit much for me.

But have no fear, EATING AUTHORS will still be here for you, bright and early each Monday. As proof of that, even though I’m frantically packing and preparing Klingon certification exams, here’s N. S. Dolkart, this week’s guest. His first novel, Silent Hall debuted just last month from Angry Robot. It’s a fantasy that begins with a plague, and goes on to include wizards, gods, and a dragon. Seriously, he had me ay plague. Better still, Noah (yes, that’s what the N stands for) is already at work on a sequel.

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I generally attend several conventions a year, and as I’ve been doing this whole writer thing for a while now, I’ve had opportunity to meet a lot of authors. Some I see maybe once a year, on a panel or during a party. Some I manage to enjoy the occasional meal with here or there. And every now and then circumstances come along that involve an extended time with one or more writers. This week’s EATING AUTHORS guest and I took that to new levels last month, as we shared a condo for a week of intense critique and culinary exploration as part of the Rio Hondo writers’ retreat. But, while it was memorable for me, I don’t think that’s something that will be showing up on David D. Levine‘s wikipedia page. And besides, what happens in New Mexico stays in New Mexico, right?

More notably, David’s been shortlisted for the Campbell, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards for his short fiction, and he’s taken home a Hugo. Ask most anyone, and they’ll tell you he’s an incredible short story writer. Which makes me all the more excited that his first novel, Arabella of Mars, comes out tomorrow from Tor Books. It reminded a great deal of those old Jack Vance planetary romances, updated to modern sensibilities, and then thrust backward into the world of steampunk. So, yeah, go get a copy, you’ll like it.

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Welcome to the first Monday in July, which if you’re in the USA you very well may have off from work as it’s what we like to call Independence Day. Which is as good a reason as any that this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest is from the UK.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is known far and wide for his popular (and currently ten volume strong) Shadows of the Apt series, which can be (poorly) described as a universe with assorted human-like races that differ from one another on the basis of various insect properties as well as whether or not they can wield magic. You know, that old trope.

He’s since started a new fantasy series, Echoes of the Fall (which begins with The Tiger and the Wolf), as well as a more traditionally SF novel (Children of Time). Meanwhile, his newest work, Spoils of War, comes out next week, the first book in Tales of the Apt, a companion series which will doubtless thrill fans of the earlier decalogy with a range of short stories addressing questions, events, backstories, and more that weren’t covered in the original novels.

Reaching out to new fans while managing to keep the old ones happy. Does it get any better than that?

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As you know, Bob, the world is a very small place. In evidence of this fact, I present this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Liz Braswell. I don’t think we’ve ever met, (or if we did, it was amidst the blur of meeting many many people at a convention or room party), but I vividly remember our first email exchanges.

Liz was working at Simon & Schuster Audio, and I was providing support on the world’s first (and I’m pretty sure, only) Klingon Language CD-ROM game. It was a rollicking, complicated thing that involved me flying into Boston to record deliberately mispronounced Klingon phrases (to help train the speech software) and getting stuck there when snow closed the airport, leaving me unable to return to Philadelphia to hand out a final exam.

I don’t think I ever told Liz about this, but I had to phone the assistant to the president of the small, liberal arts, Catholic college, and explain that she needed to have someone else proctor the exam (which I’d left sitting in a neat stack on my office desk). She insisted it was my responsibility to somehow get back. I explained that snow counted as an “act of God” and we were off to the races.

I didn’t get tenure there, but that’s not Liz’s fault.

In any case, it was more than a decade ago, and the game executive I knew back then was secretly (or, okay, maybe not so secretly) writing books. Which is awesome, and I’m really happy to have her here!

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As this week’s installment of EATING AUTHORS goes live, I should be on a plane flying home from a long and amazing week at Rio Hondo, a writers’ retreat which this year was held at an elevation of some 8,400 feet in Angel Fire, NM. Please believe me when I tell you I am eager to get back to sea level.

Meanwhile, because it’s a Monday, I asked Micah Joel to drop by and share a few words about his most memorable meal.

There’s a good chance you’ve not encountered any of Micah’s work yet. Over the past five years or so he’s sold about a dozen stories. Last month he self-published his first novel, Broken Tablet, book one in a proposed series, the Ixion Revolution. Described as “Bronze Age Time Travel,” he had me at the elevator pitch: a Silicon Valley engineer gets trapped in the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. Seriously, what more do you need?

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