Stray observations

From my Files of the Bizarre:

• No argument here: "It's official: English is a genuinely weird language." And that's a linguist writing.
• And weirder still? “One Trillion Times Age of the Cosmos” – Rarest Thing Ever Detected.
• How to rank this? "For decades, Garfield telephones kept washing ashore in France. Now the mystery has been solved." (Would it be wrong to call this Odie-ous?)
• Now let's toss in a decidedly odd business "plan": "Windows 10 Is Doing A Great Job Persuading People To Switch To A Different Operating System."
• But not true, IMO, of the SF genre: "E-Book Revenues Continue To Slip." Certainly, it's untrue of my personal titles.

Lower left: notice the source.

A Time for Heroes

For your listening enjoyment ...

"A Time for Heroes," one of my favorite short stories, is newly a podcast at StarShipSofa. The intro/bio starts about 2 and a half minutes in; the story itself at about five minutes. Performance is by the talented writer, gamer, and narrator, Chris C. Chen.

Back (exhausted!) from Capclave

Capclave is the DC area's annual con, held every fall. For 2019, the con was held the weekend just past, October 18-20.

This year, like most years, I took part. This year, unlike many years past, I was able to clear my schedule for the full three days. And Programming kept me hopping. I was a panelist for:

• SETI
• Does size matter? (As in, story lengths. Get your mind out of the gutter ;-)  )
• World-building
• Murderbots and Terminators
• Exoplanets

while moderating three of those panels. Also, I did a reading (two bits of flash from the newly released Muses & Musings: A Science Fiction Collection). Joined in the mass autograph session. Attended other panels. Cruised the hucksters room. Dropped by a bid party for the 2023 Worldcon. Chatted with readers -- this is a very literary con -- and editors, publishers, and other authors. Caught up with friends (too many of whom I only get to see at cons) and made new ones.

Rob Sawyer & Ed Lerner

And because every post requires at least one picture, here I am on the con's opening day at lunch with co-GoH -- and good buddy -- Robert J. Sawyer.

(And yes, the glare is astonishing.)

Kudos

"Nobel Prize in physics awarded for research on exoplanets and the structure of the universe."

'Nuff said.

The Company Man

Updated July 29, 2023

Back in print and electrons. Updated links below

I am pleased to announce publication of my latest novel, The Company Man.

(Also a bit frazzled. This is my second new-book release in less than a month, the previous one being the short-fiction collection Muses & Musings. No way do -- or could -- I write two books in a month; it's a matter of different publishers getting different books into production at different paces. But I digress.)

The Company Man, in a very few words, is a near-future, space-centric mystery. Think: Dashiell Hammett meets Andy Weir. In a few more words, borrowed from the cover:

The Company Man, lowly accountant for the filthy-richest business in the Asteroid Belt, has modest aspirations. Air and water not endlessly recycled. Food that had not been freeze-dried and re-hydrated. A few quiet days at home. And, if he can figure out how, pilfering a bit from the company.

Alas, working as he does for evil geniuses, that final ambition seems impossible -- until, at the end of an interminable trek among remote company mining asteroids, a mysterious emergency preempts his return flight. Someone has discovered a flaw in the company’s legendary security, even if people must apparently die to exploit it.

That ... isn’t necessarily an obstacle. Or even the least of the consequences, in the Belt, elsewhere in the Solar System, and across Earth itself. With the body count rising, even the vast fortunes at stake cease to matter -- and only the Company Man has a chance of averting interplanetary disaster.

If he survives ....

For the Grantville Gazette readers among you, TCM is the novelization of a six-part story arc that ran in recent years (between May 2017 and May 2019) in the Universe Annex (non-1632) department.

This being a commercial announcement, here are the Amazon links for The Company Man for the Kindle and The Company Man in trade paperback.