June 2024: Robin Sloan, Clara Ward and Rudy Rucker
JUL 24, 202491 MIN
June 2024: Robin Sloan, Clara Ward and Rudy Rucker
JUL 24, 202491 MIN
Description
ROBIN SLOAN was raised and educated in Michigan, and attended Michigan State University, where he co-founded the literary magazine Oats and graduated with an economics degree in 2002. He worked for about a decade at the intersection of media and technology before publishing his first novel. In 2003, he founded the SnarkMarket blog with some friends, and then moved to the SF Bay Area in 2004 to work, first at Current TV as a media strategist/interactive producer, and then at Twitter as a media manager.
His new novel, Moonbound, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He has developed a special website as a companion to the novel, here: https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/
Sloan's first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, was released in 2012. His second novel, Sourdough, was released in September 2017. He has written fiction and commentary for many publications, including the NY Times, the Atlantic, and MIT Technology Review. His novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Sloan and his partner Kathryn Tomajan produce olive oil under the Fat Gold brand, harvested off leased land in Sunol, California.
RUDY RUCKER is, quite honestly, one of the most important and visionary figures in science fiction literature working today. A writer, mathematician, artist, and a Silicon Valley computer science professor emeritus, Rucker is regarded as a contemporary master of science-fiction, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. He received the very first Philip K. Dick award for his cyberpunk novel, Software, and another for Wetware. It's worth noting that his novel Software (1982), was the very first SF work to introduce the (by now very familiar) notion of transferring a human personality to a bot. What's more, Software was the first SF novel in which robot minds are evolved, rather than being designed.
As well as writing cyberpunk, Rucker writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism—where the author uses SF archetypes to symbolize the concerns of the characters. Rucker's forty published books include non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. Rucker has also worked on several software packages; he runs a podcast of his talks; and you can browse some of his works online, including his autobiography Nested Scrolls and his Complete Stories. https://www.rudyrucker.com/
CLARA WARD lives in Silicon Valley, California, on the border between reality and speculative fiction. Be the Sea, their latest novel, takes place in the same near future as “Dream the Sea,” available here online from Small Wonders Magazine and is a science fantasy journey across the Pacific featuring sea creature perspectives, human tech, chosen family, and the world's best chocolate. Clara's short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Decoded Pride, and The Arcanist. When not using words to teach or tell stories, Clara uses wood, fiber, and glass to make practical or completely impractical objects. More of their words along with crafted creations can be found at https://clarawardauthor.wordpress.com/