Posts Tagged ‘Eating Authors’

This is an odd week for me. In a few days time I’m flying off to Vilnius, Lithuania to be the GoH at Lituanicon XXVII. Such an historic departure seemed like a good time to do things a bit differently here on EATING AUTHORS where the guests have been almost exclusively novelists.

In that spirit, allow me to introduce you to Mary Turzillo, former English professor, a Nebula Award winning short story writer, and poet extraordinaire. Her collection of poems, Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her latest collection, Lovers & Killers, won the Elgin award. Her poems have also been nominated for the Stoker and Rhysling Awards (the latter, twice!). And finally, please, don’t be intimidated by the mixer blades she’s holding in the photo above, she’s referencing a point that she’ll explain in a moment, not threatening you (or even me). Promise.

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2016 has been a crazy travel year for me, including about four times as many appearances at conventions and signings than I normally do. In addition to driving all over, some spots were just too distant to reach by car, and so I’ve had my busiest year ever in terms of flying. One such trip was to the Pacific Northwest where I attended Norwescon for the first time. And that’s where I met this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Marguerite Reed.

Marguerite was there because her first novel, Archangel, was a finalist for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award, surely one of the best ways to break into the field. It’s also a nice feather in the cap of publisher Arche Press, who last year also published Matthew Kressel‘s brilliant King of Shards.

Not content to rest on her laurels, Marguerite has a sequel scheduled for release in 2017. So if you want more of the Chronicles of Ubastis, you’ll be able to pick up a copy of Legion come next May.

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I am recently returned after spending over a week in Kansas City, where I celebrated my 11th wedding anniversary and also ate phenomenal meals at French, Austrian, German, and American fine dining venues, among others. And yes, there was also a night set aside to experience the city’s historic barbeque.

Oh, and I also spent five days of blur that correspond to the 74th World Science Fiction Convention that also happened to be going on in the city at that time. In my experience, the WorldCon is the best example we have of temporal distortion. So many days, so many panels and readings, so many people to meet and hug and shake hands with and speak to for far too short a time. And poof. How did it possibly go by so quickly. I feel I can barely recall any of it.

Well, that’s not quite true. I vividly recall doing a panel with this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Claire McCague. The convention had assembled five scientists (four of us had PhDs!), covering the span from geology to rocket science, and we spent the hour answering questions from the audience and solving all of the world’s problems.

Claire’s first novel, The Rosetta Man, came out from EDGE Publishing a year ago. It’s exactly the sort of book you’d expect from a Canadian who produces nanostructured materials by day, works for a university, and plays in a string band. Which is to say, it has a lot of squirrels in it. You’d be nuts not to pick up a copy today.

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I’m writing this a bit further in advance than is my usual routine, because by the time it posts I’ll have been away at this year’s WorldCon for the past week, and I don’t expect to return home until tomorrow. But neither rain, nor sleet, nor excessive con-going activities can stop the weekly juggernaut that is EATING AUTHORS, and so here we are.

This week’s guest is the real deal; Geoffrey A. Landis isn’t just another SF author, he’s a card-carrying NASA scientist and is actively contributing to the work that will carry us to Mars and beyond! The accolades he’s received from the scientific community are paralleled by those in the SF community, including the Nebula Award, two Hugo Awards, both the Locus and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, as well as the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings that inspire the human exploration of space” which neatly bridges his two worlds.

If hard SF is your thing, you can’t do much better than reading Geoff’s stuff!

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The last few days have been pretty exciting for me. Friday was World Elephant Day, and as such it seemed like an ideal date to announce that the fine folks at Tor Books had purchased a sequel to my novel Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard (we’re still working on a title). Then on Saturday, Barsk received the Cóyotl Award for Best Novel of 2015. Yesterday I did massive amounts of laundry and packed up so that today, Monday, I could fly off to Kansas City for an early arrival at the WorldCon.

I suspect this kind of frenetic pace is routine for this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest. Certainly she travels more than any other two authors I can name. I’ve known Mary Robinette Kowal since 2005 and have had the pleasure of watching her skills expand and her career explode. Nowadays she describes herself as a puppeteer and a novelist, but she’s known for being a voice actor, an art director, a past SFWA Board member, and an award-winning podcaster. Her work as an author has brought her the Campbell Award, multiple Nebula nominations, and two Hugo Awards, to say nothing of her legion of dedicated fans.

Mary’s Glamourist Histories series — often described as Jane Austen with magic — spans five volumes of utter delight (and not just because Doctor Who has a cameo in each volume). Tomorrow sees the release of her latest novel, Ghost Talkers, with as compelling a premise as anything you’re likely to hear (full disclosure: I heard Mary read a snippet from the book months ago and I’ve been hungering for it ever since). Take note, this is a title you’ll see on all the award short lists next year.

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If you’re reading this on Monday morning (i.e., soon after it posts), please know that I have somehow managed to haul myself out of bed, visions of the glorious past four days at GenCon still dancing in my head, and dragged myself to the DayJobâ„¢ to toil away at vast amounts of data. Do Not Try This At Home.

Instead, I recommend you continue reading here, and meet this week’s EATING AUTHORS guest, Randy Henderson. Sorry, that’s about the best segue I can manage after completing three conventions in three weeks.

So what can I tell you about Randy? Well, he’s quirky. A self-described “milkshake connoisseur,” — seriously, what does that even mean? And what about malt? Huh, Randy, huh? — he took home the big prize from the Writers’ of the Future in 2014, and has since made a name for himself writing the Familia Arcana, a series of dark, funny, urban fantasy novels about Finn Gramaraye, a nice enough guy who gets framed for crimes of necromancy, and we’re off and running. The third book, Smells Like Finn Spirit isn’t due out until next March, but do go ahead and get started with the first two now, if you haven’t already discovered these books.

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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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