Earthseed on Facebook

My novel Earthseed now has its own page on Facebook, and Paramount has officially renewed its option on the book.

Save Your Eyes

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. 

Remembering Harry Harrison

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.

Don't Steal My Books

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.

Remembering Gore Vidal

About himself, Gore Vidal once said: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

My earliest memory of Gore Vidal isn't of him as a writer (I came to that later and have read most of his essays and novels), but as an aspiring political figure. He ran for Congress in 1960 in the district adjoining ours; my family lived in Albany, New York at the time, but even as a child I could see that Mr. Vidal was in a losing battle. It wasn't just that his district, unlike Albany's, was heavily Republican; no one as iconoclastic and as relentlessly frank as Gore Vidal was ever going to win any important political office in the U.S.

That he didn't win his political races may have been literature's gain, but it was also America's loss. We could have used that often cranky gadfly in the House or the Senate. The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE: A fascinating look at Vidal's teleplays and screenplays by F.X. Feeney at the Los Angeles Review of Books.