A science fiction blog featuring science fiction book reviews and with frequent ramblings on fantasy, computers and the web.
Due to a snafu on my part, I missed a response for yesterday’s Mind Meld. Apologies to Bryan Thomas Schmidt for dropping the ball with his response. As a refresher, here is the question again:
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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
This week we asked about Food and Drink in SF.
This will, I will admit, be a purely foodie view: I enjoy cooking, I enjoy eating, I enjoy reading about cooking and eating. And for a long time, it seemed as though we foodies were, if not the minority in genre, then certainly underserved.
There were the banquets in fantasy, of course, and the trail rations, and sometimes even a discussion of where the food came from, but – like bathroom breaks and sleeping – it often seemed tossed into the pile of “boring, don’t write about it.”
And science fiction? Mainly, science fiction mentioned food in context of technology: food-pills, space-age packets, vat-grown meat, etcetera. I suspect that many writers of the time had been heavily influenced by the early space program, and extrapolated their SF on the actual science. Surely, science fiction was saying, we had more important things to do than cook – or eat!
Even when they were dealing with an important, food-related issue (overcrowding, famine, etc), MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM made it a (very serious) punchline. So did “To Serve Man.” But scenes of characters preparing their food, or even enjoying it, were notably, if not entirely, absent.
(even CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY made the “too busy to eat” point with the 3-course-meal-gum…)
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Bryan Thomas Schmidt: So Brian, you just launched your fourth Kickstarter, this one to fund Year Two of Fireside. In some ways, the most ambitious one yet. Tell us a bit about that.
Brian White: We funded three issues individually on Kickstarter last year. We figured we were eventually going to run into fatigue over the repeated Kickstarters, and we did with the third. We didn’t reach our funding goal until literally 12 seconds before the deadline. And so we knew we needed to figure out a way to provide more stability and certainty, both for our fans and for the magazine. What we came up with for Year Two was revamping into a monthly subscription website and ebook. Each issue in Year Two will have two flash fiction stories, one short story, and one episode of a serial-fiction experiment by Chuck Wendig. It is definitely the most ambitious we’ve been. We streamlined some things to make the magazine a little cheaper to produce, such as eliminating the comic we had been doing. But it’s still a much higher goal than we’ve set before: $25,000. Most of that — $20,000 — goes to paying our writers, artists, and web developers. If we can fund the full year, it gives us a lot of breathing room to plan for the future.
[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
This week we asked out panelists the following question:
Here’s what they said…
Laura Lam was raised near San Francisco, California, by two former Haight-Ashbury hippies. Both of them encouraged her to finger-paint to her heart’s desire, colour outside of the lines, and consider the library a second home. This led to an overabundance of daydreams. She relocated to Scotland to be with her husband, whom she met on the internet when he insulted her taste in books. She almost blocked him but is glad she didn’t. At times she misses the sunshine.
I don’t listen to many audiobooks, but ebooks have definitely changed my reading habits. As a combination of being a poor university student and living in tiny quarters, I avoided buying most books I read because there would be nowhere to store 100 books a year. I limited myself to the occasional splurge but mainly relied on libraries, friends, etc. Now, I still live in tiny quarters but I’m not as poor as I was as a student. I buy a lot more of my books as ebooks, and I’m a lot more diverse in my reading. I also read more books and read them quicker because I don’t have to lug myself to the library or bookstore or wait for the book to arrive. If I read a great review of an SFF book, 5 minutes later I can be curled up on my sofa reading it with a nice cup of tea. I’m able to support authors I admire without running out of room to turn around in my tiny flat. At first, I found reading on the Kindle distracting, but now I’m used to it, and I could never go back to not having an e-reader.
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Claire Ashgrove has been writing since her early teens and maintained the hobby for twenty years before seeking a publisher. Her first contemporary novel, Seduction’s Stakes, sold to The Wild Rose Press in 2008, where she continues to write steamy, sexy stories. Claire’s paranormal romance series, The Curse of the Templars debuted with Tor in January 2012. The second book, Immortal Surrender, was just released in September, and the third follows in March 2013. For those who prefer the more erotic side, she also writes for Berkley Heat as the National Bestselling Author Tori St. Claire. She is an active member of Romance Writers of America, and her local RWA chapters. She lives in Missouri on a farm with her two toddler sons, and too-many horses, cats, and dogs. She can be found online as @ClaireAshgrove on twitter, on Facebook and via her website and blog.
SFFWRTCHT: What got you started with speculative fiction? Which authors, books or movies inspired you?
Claire Ashgrove: What got me hooked was an infusion of R.A. Salvatore, The Hobbit, and Steve Berry. More than anything, I got hooked in fiction. Escaping to different worlds. Making my own. I love world building. Steve Berry is a huge influence on my speculative fiction… I’m also a huge fan of R.A. Salvatore and his Drizzt books. Of course, I read romance, and Meredith Duran I can’t put down, along with Karin Tabke/Harlow, Maggie Shayne and Shayla Black. I adore Faulkner as well. If I can ever make an impact like “My mother is a fish”… I’ll have reached my personal goal.
James Van Pelt is a Colorado based English teacher and speculative fiction writer who has written over 100 short stories, novels and has four collections of his short work. His fiction has appeared in publications including Analog, Asimov’s, Realms Of Fantasy, Weird Tales, numerous anthologies and several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s written nonfiction for Tangent and was a 1999 finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He’s received several Nebula and Stoker nominations for his stories. A father and husband, he can be found online via his website or his blog.
SFFWRTCHT: First things first, where’d your interest in science fiction and fantasy come from?
James Van Pelt: For science fiction, my dad had a big influence. He was an aeronautical engineer who love astronomy, space, rockets and science fiction. When I was little, we’d go to the drive-in to watch science fiction films that my mom didn’t want to see. We’d see all of them: junk, good stuff, it didn’t matter. He’d point out where the science was bad during the film. It was like being entertained and being in class at the same time. My interest in fantasy didn’t come until later, when I found a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring in the student center of Metro State College. I fell into that book and didn’t emerge for a week. Tolkien is responsible for my poor grades that quarter.
Best Fan Writer Hugo-winner Jim C. Hines nominated me to moderate the first panel I was ever on. He loves breaking in new writers. His Jig The Dragonslayer trilogy, now out in a Daw omnibus, is a humorous sword and sorcery tale about a goblin. He followed that with the four book Princess cycle which are fairy tales gone awry crossing Disney princesses with Charlie’s Angels. Published by Daw Books, his latest book Libriomancer starts a new trilogy, Magic Ex-Libris, about a librarian hunting a killer. Because he likes to stretch himself, being as he lives in Lansing, he set this series in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s an urban fantasy with a lot of humor, involving dryads, wizards, vampires, automatons and more. Jim’s short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy, Andromeda Spaceways, Writers of the Future and several anthologies. He can be found online at Facebook, Twitter via his website at and his blog.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Jim C. Hines about his career and his exciting future projects.
SFFWRTCHT: Starting at the beginning, Where’d your interest in SFF come from?
Jim C. Hines: Ahem. Is this thing on? My interest in SF/F comes from the fact that swords and magic and spaceships and lightsabers are awesome.
Beyond The Sun is an anthology of space colonists stories currently being funded on Kickstarter. Editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt really needs your help to make it happen. Writers include Robert Silverberg, Mike Resnick, Nancy Kress, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Cat Rambo, Jennifer Brozek, Jamie Todd Rubin, Brad R. Torgersen, Jean Johnson, Erin Hoffman, Jason Sanford and more. If the project is funded, it will be released either print on demand by the editor or with a small press. The goal is to pay the authors and artists to illustrate the stories at professional rates. In this economy, many small presses are struggling, so the editor felt the concept and talent deserved better than token rates and decided to bring it before fandom and ask for support. There are some great prizes, including special artwork, signed copies, and more available to backers. Kickstarter has information on the anthology, including a full list of writers and artists, bios, guidelines and rewards. The project has less than 1 week remaining to fund. Please consider contributing to this exciting collection.
Visit the Kickstarter page for glimpses at Silverberg’s story, including the accompanying illustration and for links to stories by other invited writers. Grasping For The Wind has a free excerpt by Autumn Rachel Dryden.
And, as extra incentive to check out this fine anthology, here’s an exclusive excerpt of one of the stories, written by Jason Sanford.
The English arrived at the farm shortly before supper, their ship buzzing my draft horses and baling combine and kicking a cloud of hay dust into the dry air. Even though I wasn’t impressed with the ship’s acrobatics, my younger brother Sol, who’d been wrapping the hay bundles with twine, stared at the English with excitement. Knowing I wouldn’t get any more work out of him, I stopped the horses. The socket in the back of my head itched in resonance to our new visitors, which I took to be a particularly bad sign.
The ship landed by the barn and three English stepped off. One, an older woman named Ms. Watkins, had served as New Lancaster’s mediator between the Amish and English for the last three centuries and always respected our customs, as demonstrated by the plain gray dress she wore. The other English, though, didn’t share her regard. The man behind Ms. Watkins wore a blue militia uniform, a definite slap at our nonviolent beliefs, while the teenage girl beside him was naked except for a swirl of colors obscuring her private parts. She gazed around the farm and smiled when she spotted me.
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If you could get a new Wheel Of Time short by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, new stories from Shannara, Word/Void, Riyria, Demon Cycle, Vault of Heaven, Temeraire, Broken Empire, and more all in one collection, what would you say?
Well, if you haven’t heard of Shawn Speakman, perhaps you’ve heard of his website: The Signed Page where he makes available signed copies of new releases for fans who can’t make it to events where their favorite author appears in person. Or maybe you know him from Suvudu.com, the Random House speculative fiction blog where he’s a regular contributor or from the websites he runs for authors like Terry Brooks and Naomi Novik.
What you may not know is that Shawn suffers from Hodgkins lymphoma. Diagnosed in 2011 and without health insurance, his treatment has left him with thousands in medical bills. Faced with filing bankruptcy, Shawn sought another way out. A way he could make it through without dealing with the 10 year nightmare a filing would bring. Then his friend Terry Brooks offered him a short story Shawn could sell to help alleviate those bills and an idea came to his head. What if he did an anthology from some of the many author friends he’d made over the past few years from both Suvudu, The Signed Page and his other activities?
Bryan Thomas Schmidt: Okay, Matt, so I launched my first Kickstarter the other day for this anthology called Beyond The Sun, space colonists stories, and in part, it’s your fault. I saw how much success you’ve been having with Kickstarter and thought it might be the best way to get my passion projects off the ground. How many Kickstarters have you run so far now?
Matt Forbeck: I’ve completed four Kickstarters, each of which is part of this 12 for ’12 challenge I set out for myself to write a dozen novels this year. I wanted to try something like this for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how I could afford to take the time to write the books until Kickstarter came along. It provided me a clean and easy way to reach out to readers and see if they liked my pitches for my books enough to support them.
I broke the dozen books up into four trilogies and ran a Kickstarter drive for each one of them. I’m happy to report that every one of them smashed past its funding goal, and I’m now busy writing all those books.
New York Times Bestselling Author A.J. Hartley has written mystery-thrillers, middle grade and adult fantasy, historical fiction and Shakespeare novelizations. Born in Northern England, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he specializes in the performance history, theory and criticism of Renaissance English drama and works as a director and dramaturg. His middle grade fantasy novel, Darwen Arkwright and Peregrine Pact was just awarded SIBA’s Young Adult Book of The Year this month. His novels include two Darwen books, The Mask Of Atreus, On The Fifth Day, What Time Devours and Tears Of The Jaguar, the Hawthorne Saga fantasy novels, including Act Of Will, MacBeth: A Novel with David Hewson, and several academic and nonfiction books. An active member and contributor to the popular www.magicalwords.net blog along with authors like David B. Coe and Faith Hunter, he can be found online at Facebook, at his website at http://ajhartley.net/ or at www.magicalwords.net.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to A.J. Hartley about his career and his exciting future projects.
SFFWRTCHT: When did you become interested in storytelling and writing and how did you get started? Studying in school? Experimenting? Workshops? Trial and error?
DB Jackson, aka David B. Coe, was born on March 12, 1963, the youngest of four children who all grew up to be writers. David received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and then attended Stanford University as a graduate student in United States history. His novels include Children of Amarid, volume one of The LonTobyn Chronicle. 
In 1999, The LonTobyn Chronicle was awarded the William L. Crawford Memorial Fantasy Award by theInternational Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA). The Crawford award is given annually to the best book or series by a new fantasy author. Thereafter followed the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands, five volumes, and Blood of the Southlands set in the same world as Winds of the Forelands. He’s also written Robin Hood, a tie-in novelization for the Russell Crowe film and is a founding member and proud contributor to the Magical Words blogsite, dedicated to the craft and business of writing. The Magical Words crew collaborated on How To Write Magical Words: A Writer’s Companion from BellaRosa Books. His first urban historical fantasy, Thieftaker, released from TOR this year under the nom de plume, DB Jackson.
David and his wife have two daughters and live on the Cumberland Plateau. He can be found online via Facebook, Twitter as @DavidBCoe and @DBJacksonAuthor or via his websites at http://dbjackson-author.com/ and http://www.sff.net/people/DavidBCoe/.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to DB about his career and his exciting future projects.
SFFWRTCHT: Let’s get the big reveal out of the way first. You are the artist also formerly known as David B. Coe, no symbol, correct?
[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
This week we asked about Revisions. I’ve come across a couple of examples lately of authors reissuing books with significant changes from the initial publication, or changing it relatively late in the initial publication process. With the rise of ebooks, the potential for rolling revisions to books is a very real possibility.
We asked this week’s panelists the following:
This is what they had to say…
I’m a measure-twice, cut-once kind of writer; I do a lot of note-taking and thinking before I start a project. I try to have a plot destination in mind, although sometimes that will change — if the story wants to go someplace other than what I planned I’m happy to take that detour. But the upshot is I seldom start a story with no clue where I’m going, and consequently I only rarely have to make major changes to a story or novel. I do my very best to turn in clean, ready-to-publish drafts to my editors. But typos and continuity errors happen, so fixing them is part of the editorial process.
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Dr. Ben Bova has written more than 120 futuristic novels and nonfiction books, and has been involved in science and high technology since the very beginnings of the space age. President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, Dr. Bova received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, “for fueling mankind’s imagination regarding the wonders of outer space.” His 2006 novel Titan received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. In 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award “for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature.”
A frequent commentator on radio and television and a widely-popular lecturer, he was an award-winning editor and an executive in the aerospace industry. He received the Science Fiction Achievement Award (the “Hugo”) for Best Professional Editor six times. In 2001 Dr. Bova was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received the 1996 Isaac Asimov Memorial Award; was the 1974 recipient of the E.E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction; the 1983 Balrog Award winner for Professional Achievement; the 1985 Inkpot Award recipient for his outstanding achievements in science fiction. In 2000, he was Guest of Honor at the 58th World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 2000. Dr. Bova is a multi-Hugo winner as Editor of both Analog and Omni, as well as for his many novels, which include Saturn, Mars, The Sam Gunn stories/novels, The Kinsman Saga, The Asteroid series, and The Orion series, amongst others. His latest novel, Orion and King Arthur, just released from Tor Books. He can be found online via Facebook or his website at http://www.benbova.net.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Ben about his career, his approach to craft and his exciting future projects for us.
SFFWRTCHT: Where’d your interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy come from?
Robert J. Sawyer has won 46 national and international fiction awards including a Hugo, a Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He’s been called the Dean of Canadian science fiction and Canada’s premier science fiction author and lives in Ontario with his wife, a poet. His novel, Flashforward, was the basis of the ABC TV series in the U.S. His other novels include Terminal Experiment, Illegal Alien,The WWW Series, The Neanderthal Parallax and The Quintaglio Ascension trilogies, Calculating God, Mindscan and his latest Triggers from Tor Books.
His short fiction has appeared in anthologies like Dinosaur Fantastic, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, and Far Frontiers, and three short story collections. He can be found on Twitter as @robertjsawyer and Facebook and via his website.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt had an extensive conversation with Rob about his craft and work for us.
SFFWRTCHT: Let’s start with the basics: Where’d your interest in science fiction and fantasy come from? And who/what were some of your favorite authors and books?
Robert J. Sawyer: Growing up in the 1960s with Star Trek and Apollo, plus seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in first run. Clarke Childhood’s End, Pohl Gateway, Niven Ringworld , Asimov Caves of Steel.
My latest space opera novel, The Returning, follow up to last year’s The Worker Prince, wound up being modeled after thrillers like Robert Ludlam’s Bourne novels and got me thinking a lot about great science fiction and fantasy thrillers. Obviously science lends itself well to the thriller genre, and the thriller genre is one of the easiest and most fun to cross-mix with other genres. So based in part on Amazon listings and recommendations from friends and fellow writers, here’s list of 15 such thrillers SFSignal readers might enjoy.
One can’t talk about Science Fiction and Fantasy thrillers without first mentioning two very important classics which are precursors. Both were published at the end of the 19th Century and remain popular even today.
Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short science fiction. He is the winner of five Hugos, a Nebula, and other major awards in the United States, France, Spain, Japan, Croatia and Poland. and has been short-listed for major awards in England, Italy and Australia. He is the author of 68 novels, over 250 stories, and 2 screenplays, and is the editor of 41 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages. He is the Guest of Honor at the 2012 Worldcon and can be found online as @ResnickMike on Twitter or at www.mikeresnick.com.
Brad Torgersen is a full-time healthcare tech geek by day, and United States Army Reserve Warrant Officer on weekends. He is a Writers of the Future winner, as well as a contributing author for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine—the latter awarding him the “AnLab” readers’ choice prize for best novelette, 2010. Presently, Torgersen is a Campbell nominee for Best New Science Fiction writer, Hugo nominee, for his novelette, “Ray of Light,” and also a Nebula nominee, for the same novelette. “Guard Dog” is the first of several collaborations with Mike Resnick. Brad can be found online at bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com.
Their collaboration in the anthology Space Battles, “Guard Dog”, is the moving tale of a Watchfleet sentinel named Chang, who leads a lonely life of extended, dream-filled sleeps in between frenetic, life-or-death battles. The Sortu had almost defeated humanity and the lives of everyone, including his wife and son, depend on men like him. Then, called to battle again, he finds himself up against the last opponent he’d ever expected…
BTS: Where’d your interest in SFF come from?
Mike Resnick: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books and Groff Conklin’s anthologies, both around 1950.
Brad Torgersen: My earliest memories of science fiction and fantasy – though I did not recognize what science fiction or fantasy were at the time – were of television programs from the late 70s and the very early 1980s. The original Battlestar Galactica, the original Star Trek, as well as Japanese animation imports like Battle of the Planets, otherwise known in Japan as Gatchaman. I was an eager viewer, and when I ultimately went off to see Star Wars on the big screen, I fell in love with the larger-than-life characters, other-worldly settings, and the spectacle of special effects combined with the tantalizing promise of what technology could offer.
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Recent Philip K. Dick Award nominee Jean Johnson co-headlined a new anthology edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt called Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, writing in her Theirs Not To Reason Why military science fiction universe from which a series of novels are being released by Ace. A Soldier’s Duty came out last year and An Officer’s Duty will be out in July. “It’s Not A Game” from the Space Grunts: Full-Throttle Space Tales #3 anthology was also set in this universe. She’s also the author of The Sword, The Wolf, The Cat and The Mage, amongst other bestselling fantasy romances. To check out more of her works, visit her at www.jeanjohnson.net.
Jean wishes to acknowledge everyone who has given support to their loved ones in the military, as well as to the soldiers themselves for serving.
BTS: How did you find out about the Space Battles anthology and what made you decide to submit?
Jean Johnson: I was invited back to submit again, which was an honor. I’d originally been published before by Flying Pen Press in #3, Space Grunts, with a story set in the same universe as this one. As for how I got into Space Grunts… You know, I can’t remember? I think it was through a friend of a friend.
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Glen Cook is the author of several successful series, including ten Black Company books, fourteen Garrett P.I. books, three Starfisher books, and multiple Dread Empire Books. He has also authored numerous short fiction for anthologies and other sources. Retired from General Motors, he lives in St. Louis with his wife of forty plus years, Carol, and they travel frequently to SF conventions as booksellers and panelists. Glen is busily working on sequels to his various properties.
Bryan Thomas Schmidt talks to Glen about his career, his approach to craft and his exciting future projects with us.
SFFWRTCHT: Where did your interest in SFF come from?
Glen Cook: Kind of always been there. A next door neighbor gave me a set of Tarzan books. I found and read my dad’s copy of The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. I was reading a lot of westerns and history but now turned to SF, devouring everything in the local library. I began trying to write my own in seventh grade. Did the Adam and Eve story right off, then something about aliens intervening in a battle between the Egyptians and Hittites on the Plain of Armageddon.
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Bryan Thomas Schmidt has posted the final table of contents for his upcoming anthology Space Battles: Full Throttle Space Tales #6, which will be published on April 18, 2012:
