hard sf

StarShipSofa No 426 Christopher Priest and Carli Velocci

March 8, 2016 by Jeremy Szal

Coming Up…

Interview: Carli Velocci Why do we keep using Nazis in space trope?

Main Fiction: “A Dying Fall” by Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest’s book – The Inverted World

Originally published in Asimov’s – December 2006

Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published thirteen novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.

His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. In 1996 Priest won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Prestige. He has been nominated four times for the Hugo award. He has won several awards abroad, including the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany), the Eurocon Award (Yugoslavia), the Ditmar Award (Australia), and Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire (France). In 2001 he was awarded the Prix Utopia (France) for lifetime achievement.

He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. It received two Academy Award nominations.

Chris Priest’s most recent novel The Gradual will be published by Gollancz in 2016, and in the USA by Titan Books, He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.

Narrated by Mikael Naramore

Mikael Naramore has worked in the audiobook industry since 2001 when, fresh out of college, he was hired as a recording engineer for publisher Brilliance Audio (now Brilliance Publishing, subsidiary of Amazon.com). Over time, he transitioned to Director, all the while absorbing technique and nuance from the best actors in the business. To date, Mikael has narrated well over 100 titles, under his own and assumed names. Authors range from best-sellers Nora Roberts, Lisa Gardner, Edward Klein and Clive Barker to sci-fi rising stars Wesley Chu, Ramez Naam and Mark E. Cooper.

He was recently chosen to narrate prolific playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Robert Ardrey’s seminal Nature of Man series which includes the international best-sellers African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, titles which reportedly had a very heavy influence on Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in their development of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.

Mikael is also an active writer, musician and recording artist, having scored the soundtrack to an independent short film, produced and engineered critically acclaimed rock records, and written, performed and recorded several “silly little lo-fi rock songs” of his own. He currently resides in the wild and scenic Columbia River Gorge outside of Portland, Oregon with his wife, two small boys and their beloved Golden Retriever.

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Categories: Podcast | Tags: a dying fall, asimovs, carli velocci, christopher nolan, christopher priest, hard sf, inception, mikael naramore, motherboard, nazis, the dark knight, the inverted world, the prestige, time travel sf

StarShipSofa No 425 Bruce Sterling and Jill Heinerth

March 2, 2016 by Jeremy Szal

Coming Up…

Interview: Cave diver Jill Heinerth explores hidden underground waterways running through our planet.

jill555

OASIS 28

Main Fiction: “Black Swan” by Bruce Sterling

Originally published in Interzone, reprinted in Years Best SF 15.

Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER (1992), TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003), and SHAPING THINGS (2005).

He is a contributing editor of WIRED magazine and writes a weblog. During 2005, he was the “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2008 he was the Guest Curator for the Share Festival of Digital Art and Culture in Torino, Italy, and the Visionary in Residence at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. In 2011 he returned to Art Center as “Visionary in Residence” to run a special project on Augmented Reality. He has appeared in ABC’s Nightline, BBC’s The Late Show, CBC’s Morningside, on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der Spiegel, La Stampa, La Repubblica, and many other venues

Narrated by: Paul Cram

Paul Cram’s young-with-a-touch-of-gravel voice is a bit newer to the world of audio than it is to other acting forms. Listening fans will hopefully be excited by several upcoming audio book titles in the next year being voiced by him. You can listen to his audio books that are currently available right now through Amazon, iTunes, and Audible.

Cram was most recently seen on set for the feature film WILSON opposite Woody Harrelson, and the indie film ANNIVERSARY shot in Maine, USA by movie director Jim Cole.

When not on a movie set or in a recording booth, Paul can be found deep-frying chicken wings with his sister in her kitchen, or quarreling about pop-culture with his little brother around one the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota. You can find his website Paul Cram Actor or IMDB.

Also, be sure to sign up for Paul’s monthly newsletter loaded with contest prizes, movie releases, and of course audio book narration details as they become available.

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Categories: Podcast | Tags: actor, anniversary, bruce sterling, cave diving, cyberpunk, hard sf, interzone, itunes, jill heinerth, jim cole, nature, paul cram, paul cram actor, woody harrelson

StarShipSofa No 420 David Steffen and David Brin

January 27, 2016 by Jeremy Szal

Coming Up…

Interview: David Brin and The Best Year in Space Ever!

Fact: Science News by J J Campanella

Main Fiction: “Catastrophic Failure” by David Steffen

Fiction originally appeared in Perihelion Science Fiction.

David is a software engineer and writer living in Minnesota. He is the editor of Diabolical Plots, a speculative fiction zine of fiction and nonfiction. In 2015 Diabolical Plots began publishing original fiction for the first time. He is also the administrator of the Submission Grinder, a web tool for writers to track their submissions and find markets for their work. His fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, AE and many others.

Narrated by: Mark Kilfoil

Mark “the Encaffeinated ONE” Kilfoil loves fiction, so much so that he’s written some (such as the Parsec-nominated Tainted Roses), read quite a lot (a library of over a thousand half-read books and growing) and now narrates them (sometimes actually recorded for others). He’s found that volunteering for a dozen years in radio was a decent way to get a full-time job as a Program Director at a community radio station in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, but not such a great way to finish his thesis, so he stopped at a Masters in Computer Science. He can be heard frequently on CHSRfm.ca, and two of his shows irregularly appear as podcasts, and can be found at encaffeinated.ca (CAFFEEN!) and theweirdshow.com (The WEIRD Show, winner of a Parsec Award for “Best Infotainment”). He likes cats enough to pet them but not enough to own one, and computers enough to own several but pet none of them. He will someday write a million words, but at this rate, that will require life extension, so he eagerly awaits the ability to upload into a computer, if that hasn’t already happened and this is all only a simulation.

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