First, long-awaited news! My 1st novel -SUNDIVER- never had a hardcover, till now! Phantasia Press has issued a special, limited edition of SUNDIVER, finely-bound with interiors and gorgeous cover, all by the epic artist Jim Burns! Not cheap. But if you want a lovely edition with quality to survive several geological epochs...;-)
(BTW... people keep kvelling about potential Startide or Uplift War movies. But I think Sundiver is the obvious one! A murder mystery in which the victim gets dumped into the Sun? Take that on, CSI!)
Second I'm pleased to announce new volumes in my Out of Time series of novels for teen readers who love adventure laced with history, science and other cool stuff. New books include Boondoggle by SF Legend Tom Easton & newcomer Torion Oey plus Raising the Roof by R. James Doyle! All new titles are released by Amazing Stories.
Meanwhile, Open Road republished the earlier five Out of Time novels, including great tales by Nancy Kress, Sheila Finch, and Roger Allen. The shared motif... teens from across time are pulled into the 24th Century, asked to use their unique skills to help a future that's in peril! Among characters who get 'yanked' into tomorrow include a young Arthur Conan Doyle, Winston Churchill, Joan of Arc's page and maybe... you!
All of the Out of Time books can be accessed (and assessed) here.
== A special event ==
This is way cool. A video interview with two terrific academics concerning one of the ‘lost’ founders of modern science fiction – the 19th century author, Robert Duncan Milne – who they are in-effect resurrecting from obscurity in a soon published book. Co-authored by Ari Brin! On the daringly named ‘cast “Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever.” A new anthology - The Essential Robert Duncan Milne - was released in January. One of the best anthologies of classic SF I ever saw, along with cogent commentary.
== Lists of great Sci Fi! ==
An insightful top-ten Science Fiction Novels list about the general notion of humanity dealing with inscrutable alien minds - with mentions of Existence along with some great company, including Robert Charles Wilson’s terrific Blind Lake, Octavia Butler's Dawn, and Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
And another list: SF novels that won both the Hugo and the Nebula… though that seems almost required, nowadays, now that the voting pools almost precisely overlap.
Audacity has published a fine audio for your commute - David Brin on First Contact in "Existence,"- wherein I cover a wide range of topics, from AI to the Fermi Paradox.
This one is of actual - or likely - importance to human survival! The TASAT project (There's A Story About That) is doing great! I've touted it before - a special service I tried to bring into the world for almost 20 years. And now, thanks master programmer Todd Zimmerman, it lives! Come by TASAT.org and see how there's a small but real chance that nerdy SciFi readers like YOU might one day save the world!
Among the many topics that have come up on the lively TASAT site has been great opening lines in science fiction.
Well, here’s an older blog in which I compile some of my favorites – and many others appear in comments! Though my favorite opening sentence, from a recent novel, The Melody of Memory, goes like this:
“I was nine when my words saved a man’s life; it wasn’t till later that my words killed him.”
== And more sci fi news ==
Taking classic novels to the big screen...Certainly I expect wonderful things, when Denis Villeneuve films Arthur Clarke’s wonderful Rendezvous with Rama. Still, I nurse a fond hope that Villeneuve will consider splicing in elements from Greg Bear’s magnificent novel Eon. Which expands exponentially on the rather spare (and just a little disappointing) vagueness of Arthur’s story.
Sci Fi great Ed Lerner is interviewed here about fusion and anti-matter, electromagnetic bottles, the Albercurrie drive for warping space-time to get around the speed limit of light, and neutrino communications. Plus the Prime Directive, the Drake equation, the Fermi Paradox, scientific revolutions and evolutions, stealth technologies, and alien monitoring stations keeping an eye on Earth in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.
Want escape? I read opening scenes of Existence. More is free at the book's website. Plus the vivid trailer with tons of great art by Patrick Farley!
