photo by Jerry Bauer
Saturday, August 25, 2012 at 11:24AM The Blackstone Audio book of Earthseed has received very good reviews--here and here--both of which praise the skill of the voice actor, Amy Rubinate. I was very fortunate to get her to narrate Farseed and Seed Seeker as well, and her recording of Earthseed won an Earphones Award from AudioFile Magazine.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012 at 02:05PM My novel Earthseed now has its own page on Facebook, and Paramount has officially renewed its option on the book.
Monday, August 20, 2012 at 01:07PM Spent part of this past weekend compiling a guide to Mongol names and their phonetic pronunciations, as Audible.com is producing an audiobook of my historical novel about Genghis Khan, Ruler of the Sky. If you have a long commute and want something to listen to while you drive, Ruler, which ran over 700 pages in print, is the book for you. In the meantime, audio of all three volumes of my Venus trilogy is available from Audible and my three Seed trilogy novels have been out for a while as audiobooks from Blackstone Audio.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 01:27PM The last time I saw Harry Harrison was in 2004, at the Campbell Conference hosted by James Gunn at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Harry was there to be inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (after that year, those ceremonies were moved to Seattle) and his good friend Brian Aldiss was there; both men were founders of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, given annually for the best sf novel of the year. Harry spoke at the conference, which was attended by such luminaries as Greg Benford, Greg Bear, Joan Slonczewski, Jack McDevitt, Kij Johnson, Chris McKitterick, Betty Ann Hull, George Zebrowski, Fred Pohl, and Donna Shirley, former manager for Mars exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. My last glimpse of Harry was of him and Brian Aldiss enjoying a lunch and a couple of bottles--maybe three--of wine, another reminder of how much this witty, outgoing man enjoyed life.
He's best known for the movie Soylent Green, adapted from his novel Make Room! Make Room!, but he wrote a number of other intelligent and vastly entertaining novels (one of my favorites was West of Eden) and he was an unrelenting opponent of war and advocate for reason. A detailed obituary for the Guardian by Christopher Priest (coincidentally one of this year's Campbell Award winners) is here.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 03:22PM And don't steal anyone else's, either. This post on "Free Culture" and file-sharing is about musicians, but writers are facing the same problem and none of us will make up the difference on the road.