Talkin' RAH at the library

As I mentioned in an earlier post, today Dave and I were the guests of the Eva Perry Regional Library for a discussion of the works and influence of Robert A. Heinlein.  Outside, rain was falling and threatening to freeze, but inside a hearty group of travelers braved the weather to come hear us talk. 

Click the image to see a larger version.

Amazingly, another four people later joined us, so we had a fairly full house.  (Even more surprising is the fact that the people who did not come with us greatly outnumbered those who did.) 

Everyone in attendance seemed genuinely interested in Heinlein, so we had a good time talking about the man and his works, fielding questions, and on more than one occasion, heading off on related tangents.

I'm thankful to the Wake County librarians who organized this event and who will be hosting other similar discussions during March.  These folks do great work keeping our libraries running and generally promoting books, and I am grateful for all that they do.

I also want to thank those who came to hear us talk.  You guys were crazy for going out in this weather, but you made the afternoon a lot nicer than it would have been had Dave and I faced the prospect of a room empty save for those who had come with us.  (We also thank those folks, but it's nice to have an audience you didn't bring.)

I did receive more than a few questions about my next book, so I better get busy on it!

Sunday in the library with Dave and Mark

Granted, it's not as good a title as Sunday in the Park with George, but you could indeed spend part of a Sunday--March 1, to be precise--in a library (the Eva Perry Regional Library in Apex, NC) listening to David Drake and me discuss one of the giants of SF, Robert A. Heinlein.

Check out this poster for the event. 

Click an image to see a larger version.

You'll notice that our talk is just one of many such events that the Wake County Public Libraries are running.  Here's a poster that showcases them all.

That's a great selection of classic authors and a good group of local writers discussing them.  If you're free on March 1, come out and participate in the discussion; we'll be happy to see you.  If you can't make our event, try to hit one of the others.  We'll all do our best to make the talks entertaining and informative.

A video series worth watching (and I'm in it)

A while ago, the Space Frontier Foundation enlisted the help of Dr. Kiki Sanford to create a short video series about the influence of Robert A. Heinlein on writers and technologists.  Jonathan Card, the Executive Director of the Space Frontier Foundation, helped pull together the folks involved and create the videos.  Baen Books, my publisher, was a sponsor.  The series appears on the 25th anniversary of Heinlein's death. 

The result is a series of three videos that you can find on YouTube.  You can also click below to watch the first one. 

In the series, Kiki interviewed three people:  Peter Diamandis, entrepreneur and author; Art Dula, trustee of the Heinlein Prize Trust and literary executor of Heinlein's literary estate; and me. 

My interview was the first to appear, so I'm embedding it here.  Fair warning:  I did it via a laptop's webcam while sitting in a temporary office at PT, so it's a bit stark, and I had to limit my movement quite a bit to stay on camera. 

Kiki was a great interviewer, smart and fun and very well prepared.  I enjoyed talking with her.  I hope you also find the conversation interesting. 

A book you should buy

I've promised to discuss those two deadlines I was working hard to meet.  The first (not the one related to my trip to Florida) was a project I mentioned a long time ago:  the afterword to the upcoming Baen combined edition of The Man Who Sold the Moon and Orphans of the Sky. 

I really wanted to write this afterword, because The Man Who Sold the Moon was a very important book to me.  I also feel a huge amount of fan-boy squee at the thought of my name, however small, on the same cover with Robert A. Heinlein. 

Come September, when the book is due, I'll get to see just such a cover. 

This essay was very hard for me to write, for reasons I explain in it.  I believe it's one of the better essays I've ever written, so I hope you buy the book and read it.

Here are the first two sentences of the piece, all that I'll show of it.

I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone:  The Man Who Sold the Moon helped save my life.  Really.

Intrigued?  I hope so.

For the rest, pick up the book.

A fan boy dream coming ever closer to reality

Check out the cover of this 2013 Baen book:

Click on it to make it bigger; you don't want to miss that star burst.


Oh, yeah.  Oh, hell, yeah!

I now face the pleasant task of re-reading two Heinlein classics and writing a few thousand words about them.  I can't wait!

Please buy this book

No, I'm not pleading here for you to buy copies of No Going Back, though I certainly would like it if everyone in America did. 

Instead, I'm talking about a particular paperback edition of Robert A. Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon, which you can find online here and here and no doubt in other places, as well as in some bookstores.  Baen Books, which owns the rights to this particular Heinlein title, has about 2,000 of these in stock, so we need to find 2,000 people to buy them.  Until we do, Baen won't reprint the book.

I need Baen to reprint this book.

When it does, Publisher Toni will do the same things she's been doing with other Heinlein titles that have needed new editions: commission a new Bob Eggleton cover for it, and have one of her authors write an all-new afterword for it.  

That writer will, she assures me, be me. 

My name would then be on a cover with Robert A. Heinlein.

How cool is that?

I am so excited at the prospect that I am now hand-selling this book everywhere I go.  It's a marvelous volume, and its Harriman stories were incredibly influential on me when I was a boy.  You need this book.

My name with Heinlein's on a book cover.  Damn.

Planets from space

I've discovered that I love writing short descriptions of the views of planets from space. I just completed one in Slanted Jack, and seeing the images in my mind's eye made me happy. I'm afraid of heights, but watching from planes doesn't bother me at all. I assume staring down from a spacecraft wouldn't bug me either. Something about hovering in space and looking at a world turning slowly below strikes me as a perfectly beautiful moment, an act of bearing witness to art of the greatest kind, all courtesy of nature.

I applied to the mission specialist program in the late 70s when NASA announced it, but the damage I did to my right arm when I was six kept me from making it far into the process.

Maybe Richard Branson will make it possible for me to visit space one day.

Which thought, of course, inevitably leads me to Heinlein and The Man Who Sold the Moon, an old but great book, at least to me. I don't expect I'll ever write anything that touches as many people as that story, but I'm going to keep trying until I'm dead.

Speaking of which, it's time I roll my chair to the left and return to Slanted Jack.