Nanoreviews: Live Long and Evolve; The Extractionist; The Frame-Up

Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds, by Mohammed A. F. Noor

I bought this book through Princeton University Press’s yearly book sale, which makes available an enormous selection of PUP books at, like, silly prices. I think I paid £3 for this one, and it was worth every penny.

This book is about using the science of evolutionary biology to make predictions about—or at the very least guide our search for—life on other planets. This is itself a fasincating question, but what makes this book charming is the way it integrates a deep knowledge of Star Trek lore into the discussion in plausible and entertaining ways. Mohammed A. F. Noor is not some kook arguing that Star Trek was ahead of its time or 'right' (except accidentally); and he’s not some buzzkill doing a take-down of all the things Star Trek got wrong (although he does note them). He’s simply drawing connections between his two passions in life, which are interested in the same thing—life on other planets—from very different angles.

The book is split up into six chapters. In the first, Noor discusses what conditions must be necessary for something recognizable as life to develop on a planet. For example: what is it about carbon, in particular, that makes it such a good building block? Must the life be carbon based, or could some other element serve the same function? This leads naturally into a discussion of the feasibility of species like the Horta (TOS: The Devil in the Dark), which is silicon-based, alongside real-world experiments showing that some bacteria can form molecules with silicon-carbon bonds. Other sections of this chapter discuss the necessity of liquid water, which is a useful solvent for bringing together chemical reagents, but  not necessarily the only one.  Ammonia, for example, might do the job. Noor also considers requirid temperature ranges, which are typically best when they allow water to exist in its liquid form—but if water is not the key solvent, then things might work out differently. Tolerance of extreme temperatuers is also a concern, but not a huge one. On earth alone we have extremophiles—creatures that tolerate or even prefer extreme temperatures, either hot or cold—and such entities appear in numerous Star Trek episodes, from the tardigrade-like animal Ripper in the first season of Discovery, to the silver-blooded inhabitants of the ‘demon planet’ from the Voyager episode Demon. (Althouh Noor does not mention it, I cannot let reference to the silver blood people pass without also reminding readers that they show up in the heartbreakingly excellent episode Course: Oblivion, albeit not in their extremophile forms.)

Other chapters tackle evolution, genetics, and reproduction. Noor fills this last chapter with fascinating examples of Earth species, such as the Amazon molly, which is entirely female, and reproduces by mating with males of other species. Fertilization triggers the process, but the eventual offspring contain no trace of DNA from the other species male fish. Thus the Amazon molly species remains distinct from whatever species the dildo-dad belonged to. 

Of course, when both parties in a cross-species night out are represented in the offspring, we have hybridization. This is a frequent phenomenon in Star Trek, most famously embodied in the TOS character of Spock, a Vulcan-human hybrid, but there are a variety of other hybrid characters that Noor analyses quite thoroughly. My favourite part of this chapter is his discussion of Haldane’s rule, which captures the (Earthbound) phenomenon whereby female hybrids are more likely to survive than male hybrids, and are more likely to prove fertile, contrary to the trend of sterility among hyrids. As a table on pg 128 reveals, of all the hybrids in Star Trek (up through the first couple of seasons of Discovery at least), more are female than male, and of the hybrid characters who are known to have produced offspring, all but one was female. As Noor concludes, ‘If we speculate that this depiction reflects a difference in hybrid fertility, meaning at least some of the hybrid males were sterile, then we may be observing some signal of Haldane’s Rule just lie among species on earth. I do not think that the Star Trek writers did this intentionally, but the coincidence is amusing.’

I myself suspect that this trend actually reflects a tendency of filmmakers to assign parental roles to female characters than to male characters, but I'm happy to take it as evidence of a galactic Haldane rule. Sometimes it's more fun to look for the science, even if incidentally, than to fume at sociocultural trends among filmmaking.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

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The Extractionist, by Kimberly Unger

Eliza McKay works as an extractionist in a futuristic extrapolation of our increasingly plugged in society. Extractionist is one of those jobs that doesn’t yet exist, but becomes necessary in a world where Elon Musk’s Neuralink vision actually works, and not only works, but has become the equivalent of cell phones in today’s culture. Everyone’s got an implant of one version or another, some of them state-of-the art super-fancy versions that are only accesssible if you’ve got military-grade connections, some of them super-cheap retail level chips that are perfectly fine for daily use but not up to more demanding tasks. These implants allow to directly experience cybernetic realities—sort of like the Metaverse, but, y'know, functional. Occasionally, however, people get trapped too deep, and their consciousness must be retrieved and reintegrated with their bodies. This is where Eliza McKay comes in.

So, as plot, she is hired by some secretive black-ops person to extract a member of the team who has gone too deep and knows some crucial information about Stuff. Naturally, the Stuff turns out to be much more large scale and elaborate than Eliza planned for, and heisty cybershenanigans ensue.

I cannot overemphasize the quantity of cyberstuff in this book. Everything is cyber; everything is tech; everything AI (but, y'know, functional). It’s clear that Unger has spent a great deal of time thinking about how this futuristic world will look, how the various technological advances will interface with each other, how the economics of version control and upgrades will affect people’s ability to do certain jobs or interact with different types of equipment. I quite appreciate the way the world she's created echoes the messiness of incompatible operating systems and forced reboots that plague our current digital lives. Just because you’ve got a chip in your brain that's, y'know, functional, doesn’t mean that an inconvenient software update won’t ruin your day.

Unfortunately, for all the thoughtful cyberworldbuilding, the cyberplot and cybercharacters and overall cyberexperience were underwhelming. It’s kind of funny, actually, because when I think about each individual component, I can’t identify any particular flaw beyond a mildly tortured reasoning to justify the circumstances under which extraction is necessary. The characters were fine; their motivations were present; their relationships with each other were developed. The plot proceeded reasonably pacily. I was just deeply bored throughout the entire book. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m not cyber enough to cyberappreciate what Unger is cyberdoing. 

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

The Frame-up, by Gwenda Bond

Dani used to be one of the team—a team of magic-using art thieves, to be precise—but she got snookered into betraying her mother and her team by a persuasive FBI agent, and has been something of a pariah in the magic scene ever since. Mom’s in jail, now, and none of the old team are speaking to her. However, her mother’s former patron finds Dani and commissions her to steal a very big painting, with a very big pay-out, so she has to get her quite reluctant ex-team back together and steal a magical painting, while simultaneously evading that same FBI agent and negotiating her remembered feelings for an old flame on her team, which are interfering somewhat with some nascent feelings developing for the painting’s current owner.

This books is a very straightforward heisty heist, with twists and turns exactly where you expect them to be. There are mommy issues to be worked out, old relationships to smooth over, new partnerships to build with surprisingly understanding and unbothered-by-crime painting-owners, and a very convenient diary explaining that a demon whose power is only kept in check by a magical painting must under no circumstances be allowed to regain possession of the picture.

The book is fine. The wheels work, the twists twist. But I found the romantic subplots rather tedious, largely because I don’t think jealousy is an appealing characteristic in potential love interests. And although I don’t read too many heists, and so am not used to keeping track of so many moving parts, I still think some of those convolutions were a bit unearned. For example, at one point Dani’s mother causes extreme complications for her plans for no other reason than that she thinks Dani’s got it too easy, and needs to learn how to deal with jobs when they’re hard. Which doesn’t follow, since Dani’s mother is invested in this heist as much (or more) than any of them, and certainly more invested in it than she is in Dani’s professional development. But then, since (as I said earlier), the painting’s owner seems to have no interest in actually retaining possession of the painting, and is perfectly willing to hire Dani to manage the security of his art gallery, it is undeniably true that Dani seems to be playing the game on easy. Gwenda Bond had to insert complications somewhere, and I guess she chose Dani's mother to do it.

In sum, this was fine. Perfectly good to occupy you while waiting for your laundry to be done, or to read on the bus while keeping one eye out for your stop. But it’s not a book I’m going to stay up late finishing, no matter how twistily the twists twist.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10, still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore

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References

Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds. Mohammed A. F. Noor. [Princeton University Press, 2018].

The Extractionist. Kimberly Unger. [Tachyon 2022].

The Frame-Up. Gwenda Bond. [Headline, 2024].

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CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.

6 Books With Kimberly Unger

Kimberly created her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing. This turned a literary love of science fiction into a full blown obsession with the intersection of technology and humanity.

Today she spends her day-job time in VR, lectures on the intersection of art, narrative and code and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race. You can find her on Twitter at @Ing3nu or on her blog at www.ungerink.com. Kimberly’s second science-fiction novel, The Extractionist, will be released in July of 2022.

Today she tells us about her Six Books.
 

1. What book are you currently reading?

I have, in my hot little hands, both Quantum of Nightmares and Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross. I’m a fan of all his work, but the Laundry Files strike a particular chord for anyone who has 1. spent significant waking business hours in some form of cubicle hell and 2. who has witnessed first hand the way bureaucracies have begun to evolve to handle agile and fast moving threats.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

As of this writing, The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi is on the top of my list, but I’ll probably have finished reading it by the time this goes to press. However, that’s the cool thing about books, there’s always more on the way and I’ll have something new to be excited about shortly.













3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again? 

Weirdly enough, not right now. I blame the pandemic. I went back and did quite a bit of re-reading (one of the side benefits of e-books is it’s much easier to keep them around long-term) and I’m all caught up and looking forward to the new stuff.

4. A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

Patricia K. McPhillip’s The Changeling Sea sticks with me. It’s short, it’s cleanly crafted, it’s charming, there are elements of her writing craft in that book that I strive to reference in my own style.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

I’m going to say “Caves of Steel” by Isaac Asimov. I first read it in high school and it was one of my first tastes of “harder” science fiction. At the time I was deeply into mysteries so that combination of a noir-style detective story set in a far future world opened up a lot of ideas to me about the differences between worldbuilding and narrative. It’s interesting to look back on some of those books to see where early science fiction authors got it right, because there’s always something in there they got right.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The Extractionist, interestingly enough, has its start in pop-culture sci-fi, rather than cyberpunk. In every popular-culture science-fictional world, someone gets stuck in virtual reality. Sometimes it’s a trap, sometimes they fall in love, sometimes it’s just a remnant of an alien civilization but sooner or later, someone needs a rescue. And if it really is such a common occurrence across all different universes, wouldn’t it make sense that some enterprising soul has figured out how to turn those rescues into a paid gig?


So allow me to introduce The Extractionst, a cyberpunk novel about a disgraced engineer whose bleeding-edge second career turns deadly. Eliza McKay’s called in to extract the head of an international spy ring from an undercover operation the Swim. For McKay, success means she has a shot at getting her old life back. For the client, it should mean putting the gears in motion to bring down a corporate warlord. But the kind of existential crisis that gets you stuck in a virtual reality internet isn’t driven by logic and fact. To figure out the truth, McKay must push the envelope of what the human mind can do, risking her own life and facing down mistakes from her past.

Thank you, Kimberly!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Microreview [book]: The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger

A comprehensive and realistic view of the future of the Internet, centered around a complex and well drawn protagonist.

In the near future of Kimberly Unger’s The Extractionist, our current Internet has evolved into a more complicated, and dangerous place, the Swim. The march of technology has provided for a lot of new ways to interact with that technology for ordinary people, and as always, for those on the bleeding edge. Eliza McKay is on that bleeding edge, with a rare and dangerous XWire setup in her brain that gives her an immersive connection to the data of the Swim that few can match. Few would, because Xwire installations can cause psychosis, or worse. 

For all of those skills and equipment, though, McKay  is on the margins of the technosphere, banned from doing most of what she has trained and studied and is rather good at. What McKay is doing these days is rescuing people who cannot extract themselves from virtual worlds and for various reasons simply can’t be unplugged. But when a government agency hires McKay, currently in Singapore, for such an operation, McKay finds herself caught in the middle of a story of corporate ambition, government surveillance, greed, and a lurking threat in the Swim.

McKay is the titular Extractionist.

Predicting the future of the internet or any technology is a tricky business. At best one can predict and describe a plausible future internet, given trends, technology, and human nature. Plausibility, and providing an Internet that provides the capacity for story are key to writing a story using a future iteration of current technology.  That so, it was inevitable that I kept thinking of previous genre works. Given McKay’s experimental technology and her deep connections to it and the Swim, it is natural to think of cyberpunk and cyberpunk novels, particularly. Given that there is one friendly AI and antagonist ones as well, Vernor Vinge’s True Names came to mind much more than, say, Neuromancer, because we don’t quite have the dystopian background of the latter in the world building of this novel. A more obscure connection I think also may go to Web of Angels by John Ford. While I don’t know if the author has read the novel (sadly, it is long out of print), the concept of Gailer as a Webspinner does connect with what McKay can do, which are both outside the bounds of what should be and have the potential to upend a lot of apple carts if fully manifested.

The technology in the novel goes beyond the Swim, though. There is a lot of speculation and invention involving devices in the real world, particularly nanotech, in the form of “bots”. These bots are a ubiquitous feature of Unger’s digital figure and landscape and are much like, say, a wifi signal today. One expects bots in this world to be everywhere, and Unger has some clever ideas on how they could be used on a day to day basis as well as for malfeasance and the bleeding edge of what’s possible in her future world. Between the bots and Xwire and other ways to connect to the Swim, the novel spends a lot of time thinking about levels of technology, who has access to it and what they do with it. Indeed, the “Street” does find its own uses for Technology in Unger’s world.

Early on, I had wondered why people could not simply be "unplugged" from the Swim. Instead of a relatively unrealistic "this would kill the person" sort of answer, instead, Unger uses an approach that reminded me of David Brin's Kiln People, except the alternate people are virtual beings whose later memories are incorporated into one's own. So, an unplugging from the Swim would work, but that lack of integration of memories could mean anything learned in the Swim would be lost. For many people, that's no big deal, but say, for a corporate spy or a government agent, the information is the crucial thing. So, McKay's skills find more use and a niche in this society. I also thought of the modern internet--imagining losing all of your stored emails or your twitter followers or the groups on Facebook you follow. You could reconstruct some of that, but the loss would be bitter.

As far as McKay herself as a character, I am going to turn to another genre work, a genre character as a point of reference for how I saw her, and that would be Dominic from INCEPTION. Like Dominic, McKay does not have an outlet for a lot of her skills and so has to make do with a series of marginal jobs. The novel opening with her away from her home in San Francisco and instead in Singapore reinforced that for me. Although unlike Dominic she is not banned from the United States for fear of arrest, she is under a ban for most of her work, and is constantly seeking to avoid notice by the government  And, like Dominic, she is seeking a way to get back into good graces so she can do her craft again.  And she has connections and longtime relationships that she draws upon for the “big score” that, if she plays her cards right, will give her all that she wants, just like Dominic, with the same high risk as well. 

But like her previous novel, Nucleation, the novel is strongest when we play with the technology, and not as strong when it is in more straightforward technothriller realms. However, given how immersive and ubiquitous the Swim is, and given the bleeding edge of McKay’s technology and its uses, this means that the technothriller elements are much more infused with that technology, and so, for me, they come off much better and much smoother than her previous novel. As mentioned above, the author’s strengths are in technology and the extrapolation of technological trends, and what people will do with that technology more than action beats. So the beats here, so infused with that technology and its uses (and misuses) came off much smoother for me this time around.

If there is a weakness for me for this novel, and it is something Nucleation didn’t have to deal with because it was so bottled, but this novel does have scenes on two sides of the Pacific, is a lack of consideration or extrapolation of how the world is doing besides the march of technology. Especially given how McKay is wrapped up with a government agency, and such concerns would affect someone in her position and her forced-into-profession of an Extractionist for hire, sometimes globally, the world outside the technological world portions at best static and at worst, a cypher. I think a big opportunity for a fully formed future was missed, here. 

Ultimately, The Extractionist is a successful second novel that builds on the author’s first and is in good conversation with previous novels exploring this space. It’s hard to write near future SF, to the point that authors I know actively avoid it. Unger, however, is continually ready to dive into it, and I am very interested in seeing what she will do next. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for very strong extrapolation and presentation of future technology, including the “Swim”

+1 for a well rounded and complicated central character with a fully realized past, present and future.

Penalties -1 for too light of a touch on extrapolation of the future beyond the technological.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 

Reference: Unger, Kimberly. The Extractionist [Tachyon, 2022]. 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? 2020 Hugo Award finalist for Best Fan Writer. @princejvstin.

Microreview [book]: Nucleation by Kimberly Unger

Nucleation by Kimberly Unger interestingly marries a first contact story, a technothriller, and strong speculative elements with twenty minutes into the future virtual reality tech.

“We are live. We are live. We are live.”

Those are the tag words for a VR pilot of a waldo to let their handlers know that the connection is good and they can get down to business. Helen Vectorovich knows them well as one of the best VR pilots in the business. But when a project to construct an extrasolar operation through a micro wormhole kills her NAV (navigator), it seems that the fact that there may be aliens on the other side is the *least* of Helen’s problems.

This is the story of Kimberly Unger’s Nucleation.

First Contact stories are a staple of SF. First contact in space, on alien planets, through portals, via radio and other signals. There are many changes to ring on that concept. I confess that the idea of a VR pilot making first contact via the waldoes they control is one that I had not thought of, and while, like everything, surely someone has thought of this before, it still is stunningly fresh and interesting. The author goes an excellent job with the fog of war that a first contact with the means at hand  that we have here--using telepresence robots to contact what appear to be the alien equivalent of the same. This cunningly allows the aliens to both be inhuman and not rubber forehead aliens and yet at the same time having a common basis that could allow the first contact to be more than an incomprehensible

The tech of the VR is another highlight. The author’s dayjob and long experience with tech really come to the fore here, and the novel is chockablock with it. This is a novel that understands current technology, sees where it is going and presents a future VR experience to the reader that feels like it’s 20 minutes into the future. Waldos in SF are as old as Heinlein. What Unger does here with them is to really link in and key in on the user experience, the user delights, joys and potential hazards of using the technology at very long distances. The robotic future of space travel that we seem to have gotten instead of the manned version imagined by SF writers in the 20th century gets a real examination here. Unger marries this with a 21st century understanding of how corporations and corporate power will be on that frontier and using that tech--where they will cut corners, where they will be forced to innovate, where they will conflict and clash with other corporations. There are notes from the world of Cyberpunk of corporate predation, but it feels more in line with our own present (again, the author’s personal experience really leveraged here)

The novel goes even more speculative in having the waldos going extrasolar (via wormholes), having some kinds of artificial intelligence and envisioning a future where waldoes might be used to mine asteroids and other objects. The author doesn’t spend a lot on this tech itself, just how the wormholes work or how that came to be isn’t the focus of the novel. The premise of extrasolar exploration via robots, with micro wormholes used to put those robots into other systems is the gimmie here. It is how they are used, how the operator (like Helen) controls and operates them, how their handlers monitor those operations is where the meat and potatoes of the tech and its implications lies. I wanted to know more about it, but knowing more about those on a technical level aren’t essential to the core story.

The novel provides a well rounded and very human protagonist in Helen. She’s our sole point of view, which can be a bit awkward at times and the author goes through some pains to make sure she is witness to some important events and there is just the slightest bit of shoehorning. It’s not a real defect of the novel, merely a consequence of that tight on person point of view. The author leverages this in all sorts of ways in putting us in Helen’s head and giving us a perspective for us to try and “figure out” along with Helen just what machinations, aside from the potential alien contact, are going on. She makes for an appealing and immersive character whose triumphs, successes, and boundary pushing all feel very natural and real.

If there is a real weakness, I think that a couple of the elements of the technothriller beats don’t quite come off quite as well as the rest of the narrative. The plot points and the story beats come along great and propel the plot, but whenever the focus shifts too far away from the VR experience or the experience within Far Reaches as a campus, the novel loses a bit of its steam and power. This may well be because the technological experience and grounding of the main line of the novel is so vivid, strong and immersive that when Helen is out of that environment, the novel loses a half step.

Nucleation ends most satisfactorily and with a good solid ending, but there are clear lines for potential sequels and follow ups. First Contact, after all, is just the beginning of a story involving human-alien relations. I am interested in seeing where the author goes with the story from the ending of this novel, and hope the strengths here can be leveraged further on with more of Helen’s story.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for an unique spin on a first contact story
+1 for immersive and detailed SF and tech elements with the virtual reality gear that really shows the strength of the author’s knowledge and lines of invention

Penalties -1 for some of the technothriller elements outside of the core setup not being quite as brilliant as the central elements.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 

Reference: Unger, Kimberly. Nucleation [Tachyon, 2020]. 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Kimberly Unger

Kimberly created her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing. This turned a literary love of science fiction into a full blown obsession with the intersection of technology and humanity.

Today she spends her day-job time in VR, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC’s master’s degree program and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race. You can find her on Twitter at @Ing3nu or on her blog at www.ungerink.com. Kimberly’s debut science-fiction novel Nucleation will be released in November 2020,

Today, she shares her 6 books with us:

1. What book are you currently reading? 

I just got my hands on Glorious by Benford and Niven.  I haven’t read the first two yet, so I’ve gone back and picked up Bowl of Heaven, the first book in that trilogy. That’s my current “top of the stack”.  There’s been quite a long span between the first book and the last, so I am hugely curious to see how the writing and the characterization has evolved (or if it’s evolved) over that period of time. Writers' styles tend to change as their craft improves or their deadlines get shorter or they gain life experience. I rather enjoy observing that as part of my reading.  I do the same thing with comic book artists, there are a few I’ve been following for years and it’s been fantastic to watch them grow.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I actually had to go back and look through my pre-orders to see what’s in there.  I’m one of those people who, I see a book, get really excited, then go pre-order it and forget all about it until it hits my Kindle like an un-birthday present.







3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to read again? 

I’ve been thinking about digging back into the Laundry Files, It’s been a little while since the last book came out, the new one should be dropping shortly and I do deeply enjoy the way Stross’ characters do their best in the face of a future that is stunningly bleak when you really think about it (which is part and parcel to playing in that mythos, right?).  It’s unlikely this series will have a good ending and I am hugely curious to see how it all plays out.




4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

I… erm… That’s a hard one. I have authors who I have changed my mind about, in fact most authors I’ve met have been very different than I imagined them to be from their work. Books for me are different, I hold them when I read them in my timeline because people can change for better or worse, but books cannot. When I read them now I have a different reaction.  But that’s not really changing my mind, that’s just the evolution of my experiences crashing up against it.  An example of this might be Butcher’s Dresden Files books.  I enjoy the latest books in the series, but the first few books are written with a much younger lens. Current-version me is not a fan of some of the cringeable moments in those books, but if you sit down and do a binge read, you can watch the author’s style and world-choices maturing right alongside the characters through the course of the series, which is absolutely fabulous.  I’d be more careful about recommending them than I once was.  But, I also wouldn’t want the author to do a “revised edition” to bring it in line with who I am now.  I’d rather they keep all those moments so the characters can grow out of them. So you could say that I’ve revised my opinion about the first few books in the series a little towards the negative, but the series as a whole as a positive.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Patricia K. McPhillip’s The Changeling Sea is one, it was one of the shortest books I’d run across on a shelf full of epic-length high fantasy texts, but it still managed to be complete and whole and satisfying.  I started reading science fiction with shorter, faster pulpier works like Ron Goulart’s because some kind soul had sold off tons of them to the local used bookstore, so seeing that length of book emerge on modern shelves changed the way that I think about publishing.




6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome? 

Nucleation is a story about what happens when a woman at the top of her game gets her legs kicked out from under her. It’s about working in an environment that values one’s expertise, and how when you climb back up again, you may find your view has changed.  Throw in a healthy mix of remote-space travel, nano-robotics and an alien race that’s a mirror, not of us, but the things we create, and I think, I hope, you’re going to find Nucleation worth your time.

Thank you, Kimberly!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.