Lawrence M. Schoen

Here in the greater Philadelphia area the heat wave is taking a bit of a break. My apologies to any readers who have been denied such a respite; please remember to drink plenty of fluids and check in on the elderly and unwell. And now, with that bit of summer time public service out of the way, welcome to another Monday and another installment of Eating Authors!

Our guest this week is Judson Roberts. Over the years he’s worked as a police officer, a federal agent with Naval Intelligence, a defense attorney in the Army JAG Corps, an organized crime prosecutor, and even a private investigator. With that kind of background you can easily imagine him writing police procedurals that sparkle with verisimilitude. But… no. Rather, Judson is the author of The Strongbow Saga, an epic 9th century adventure set in the world of the Vikings. No, not alternate history Vikings engaged in police procedural, real (well, fictional) Vikings. And if you’d like to know more about vikings (the nonfictional ones), he maintains an educational website with plenty of information on the topic.

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Hello and welcome to another installment of Eating Authors. Our guest today is Jamie Todd Rubin, who in addition to being an author has been an interviewer and columnist for SF Signal, and more recently an interviewer and reviewer for The InterGalactic Medicine Show. He’s also an unapologetic blogger, perhaps best known for his series of posts entitled Vacation in the Golden Age in which he went back with the benefit of a 21st Century eye and reviewed that classic pulp Astounding Science Fiction from its July 1939 issue all the way through December 1950.

Though primarily a short story author, Jamie has embraced that new-fangled technology of epublishing, and with the help of 40k Books, an epublisher specializing in novelettes, readers can find his work, such as “If By Reason of Strength” and “In The Cloud,” at the usual ebook venues.

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Welcome to the fourth of this year’s Campbell Award Nominee Eating Author segments. Just to be clear, I’m talking about the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, not to be confused with the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (which begs the question, has anyone ever been nominated for, let alone won, both?).

Today guest is Brad R. Torgersen who was nominated in his second year of eligibility for Campbell. Brad’s no stranger to awards; he was a winner in the 2009 Writers of the Future contest, won an Analog reader’s poll in 2010 for his novelette “Outbound,” and his 2011 novelette “Ray of Light” landed him on the Nebula Award ballot as well as this Hugo Award ballot. Depending on how the votes go, you may see a lot of him on the Chicago stage come September.

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Welcome to the third of this year’s Campbell Award Nominee Eating Author segments. This is your opportunity to learn a little bit more about one of the people who could be walking away with a fancy prize in just a few months’ time.

Our guest is Karen Lord who comes to us in her second year of eligibility for the Campbell. She’s probably best known for her novel, Redemption in Indigo, which isn’t surprising when you consider that it won the William L. Crawford Award as well as the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. If that wasn’t enough, it also garnered a nomination for the World Fantasy Award.

Her latest work, The Best of All Possible Worlds, comes out next February from Del Rey (but you can beat the rush by pre-ordering a copy now).

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Welcome to the second of this year’s Campbell Award Nominee Eating Author segments.

Although not actually one of the Hugo Awards, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is presented alongside them during the award ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention (held this year in Chicago). And this month, courtesy of my blog, you get to know a little something extra about your Campbell nominees.

With us today is Mur Lafferty who was nominated in her first year of eligibility. Unless you’ve been living under a hearing-impaired rock, you’re probably familiar with her work audio work. Cory Doctorow is attributed as describing her as “the doyenne of scifi podcasting” presumably for her work on feeds such as I Should Be Writing (for which she won the Parsec Award in 2007), Pseudopod, Escape Pod, and Angry Robot Books Podcast.

Somehow, amidst all that podcasting about writing, introducing and reading other authors’ fiction, and just talking with authors, she finds the time to write herself. Her superhero novel, Playing for Keeps won her another Parsec Award in 2008, as did Wasteland, aka Heaven: Season Four of her Afterlife series. Several other works have also been nominated for Parsec Awards, including Marco and the Red Granny in 2011.

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