From the Preliminary Cover copy:

Two years ago, readers eagerly devoured The Living Dead. Publishers Weekly named it one of the Best Books of the Year, and Barnes & Noble.com called it “The best zombie fiction collection ever.” Now acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams is back for another bite at the apple — the Adam’s apple, that is — with 43 more of the best, most chilling, most thrilling zombie stories anywhere, including virtuoso performances by zombie fiction legends Max Brooks (World War Z, The Zombie Survival Guide), Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), and David Wellington (Monster Island).

From Left 4 Dead to Zombieland to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, ghoulishness has never been more exciting and relevant. Within these pages samurai warriors face off against the legions of hell, necrotic dinosaurs haunt a mysterious lost world, and eerily clever zombies organize their mindless brethren into a terrifying army. You’ll even witness nightmare scenarios in which humanity is utterly wiped away beneath a relentless tide of fetid flesh.

THE LIVING DEAD 2 has more of what zombie fans hunger for — more scares, more action, more … brains. Experience the indispensable series that defines the very best in zombie literature.

The Living Dead 2 comes out in September (but you can pre-order now!). Meanwhile, here’s the table of contents:

• Introduction — John Joseph Adams
• Alone, Together — Robert Kirkman
• Danger Word — Steven Barnes & Tananarive Due
• Zombieville — Paula Stiles
• The Anteroom — Adam-Troy Castro
• When the Zombies Win — Karina Sumner-Smith
• Mouja — Matt London
• Category Five — Marc Paoletti
• Living with the Dead — Molly Brown
• Twenty-Three Snapshots of San Francisco — Seth Lindberg
• The Mexican Bus — Walter Greatshell
• The Other Side — Jamie Lackey
• Where the Heart Was — David J. Schow
• Good People — David Wellington
• Lost Canyon of the Dead — Brian Keene
• Pirates vs. Zombies — Amelia Beamer
• The Crocodiles — Steven Popkes
• The Skull-Faced City — David Barr Kirtley
• Obedience — Brenna Yvanoff
• Steve and Fred — Max Brooks
• The Rapeworm — Charlie Finlay
• Everglades — Mira Grant
• We Now Pause For Station Identification — Gary Braunbeck
• Reluctance — Cherie Priest
• Arlene Schabowski Of The Undead — Mark McLaughlin & Kyra M. Schon
• Zombie Gigolo — S. G. Browne
• Rural Dead — Bret Hammond
• The Summer Place — Bob Fingerman
• The Wrong Grave — Kelly Link
• The Human Race — Scott Edelman
• Who We Used to Be — David Moody
• Therapeutic Intervention — Rory Harper
• He Said, Laughing — Simon R. Green
• Last Stand — Kelley Armstrong
• The Thought War — Paul McAuley
• Dating in Dead World — Joe McKinney
• Flotsam & Jetsam — Carrie Ryan
• Thin Them Out — Kim Paffenroth, Julia Sevin & RJ Sevin
• Zombie Season — Catherine MacLeod
• Tameshigiri — Steven Gould
• Zero Tolerance — Jonathan Maberry
• And the Next, and the Next  — Genevieve Valentine
• The Price of a Slice — John Skipp & Cody Goodfellow
• Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven? — Sarah Langan

Promoted from the Comments, Dr. Hal Hall, Librarian and Curator of Special Collections says:

Thanks for mentioning the Exhibition. Elizabeth Moon will also be speaking at the opening. Take a look at the large banners on the Cushing Library building at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36274857@N05/sets/72157623267964811/

"Tourists" by Sean Craven

So, Sean Craven, long time commentor here at Eat Our Brains, sold his first fiction to Tor.Com a while back. I was delighted because I saw the story as his submission to the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop where I got to meet him in the flesh. Click the pic to check out the excellent revised version.

I’ve heard that SFWA Grandmaster James Gunn will give a keynote speech for the Cushing Library’s Exhibit above. I wish I could be there. After all, for the last 35 years I’ve witnessed some of that “SF & Fantasy” at TAMU. I remember the first time I ever met Jim Gunn–he came down for something and Dr. Kroiter brought him to the SF as Literature class to talk to us. I hadn’t read much of his work at that time but I was a big fan of the TV series The Immortal.

Since then I’ve learned usual lesson. The source material is almost always better.

Brad Denton was a graduate student under him, writing some of his early short fiction in the program. Read his post about meeting Dr. Gunn back in college, “First Contact with a Grand Master.”

That’s what faith is about.  A belief in something without evidence.  Yes, the Catholic church believes in miracles.  Documentation on the other hand, is iffy.  Never mind.  Let them believe.

Behavior on the other hand is a different thing.  If we are to agree on public policies that affect everyone, they really need to be based on things we can demonstrate to each other.

For instance, it is generally agreed that stepping off a cliff is a bad idea.  You can demonstrate this in many ways.  I prefer dropping a watermelon rather than an actual person, but we can clearly demonstrate, time and again, that whether the watermelon hits the ground or the ground hits the watermelon, it’s not going to end well for the watermelon.  This is called evidence.  Whether I’m an atheist, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Scientologist, we can agree, stepping off cliffs–generally bad.

Interestingly enough, it was probably only anecdotal, at first.  “I heard this guy, named Ugh went off the cliff after the mastodon and it was not pretty.” “Yeah?”  Then, through something we call inductive reasoning, we saw that every time someone went off the cliff (and lets not be petty, we’re talking cliff, not a slight drop–fifty feet minimum) there was clean-up involved.  (Unless you landed in a big pile of dung like what happened during the second defenestration of Prague.  And there was still clean-up involved.)

So, here’s where I get really incensed.  I believe that our public policies on health should be based on this evidence thing.  I don’t want people going, “Oh, my brother-in-law got aids and they threw him off a cliff.  It cured him completely.”  In particular, I am upset with the Anti-Vaccination movement, a “health” movement that is killing people daily. In the 1980’s there was doubt raised about the safety of vaccinations and ingredients used to preserve those vaccinations.  When concerns are raised, people conduct studies.  They investigate the concerns.

Consider Vioxx (rofecoxib).  On September 30, 2004, Merck voluntarily withdrew rofecoxib from the market because of concerns about increased risk of heart attack and stroke associated with long-term, high-dosage use.  Previous and subsequent studies demonstrated an 4-fold increase of heart attack and stroke.

In the late eighties, a concern was raised about vaccinations, the preservative thiomersal, and autism.  There was a concern so studies were done.  There was no correlation.  Tiomersal was removed from vaccines though in 1999 and in the interval since, there has been no drop in autism.  More detail here.

And still the anti-vaxxers claim it causes autism, though they’ve mostly shifted their attacks to the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine.  Again, evidence is against them.  Unfortunately, their influence has increased the number of families who don’t vaccinate their children leading to increased outbreaks of these diseases, some leading to death or permanent disability.

Here’s a related insanity, aptly described by Rebecca Watson of Skepchik and the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

2009 was a banner year here at Casa Ramrod, assuming that the banner said “Mission Accomplished” in a font called “Clueless Irony.”  (Yes, I know.  It’s been done.)

Nevertheless, I think I learned a few things in 2009 that may serve me well in 2010, especially if I retain the backup option of hiding under the covers.  Here, then, are a few 2009 True Facts and the lessons I’ve taken from them:

True Facts:  In June, I was diagnosed with small lymphocytic lymphoma/chronic lymphocytic leukemia.  SLL/CLL progresses slowly and is considered indolent.  So rather than start treatment, I’m engaged in “watchful waiting.”

Lessons Learned:  As I already suspected from my own personal habits, “indolent” is not a bad thing.  Barring meteor strikes or other accidents, then, I’ll probably live more-or-less normally for many more years.  I’ll just have to regard my body as if it were a suspiciously unattended package at the airport.

True Facts:  During both my endoscopy and colonoscopy, I was given a wonderful “twilight” anesthesia that made me forget the most uncomfortable and unpleasant parts of the procedures.  But I was given no “twilight” during my bone-marrow biopsy, so I remember every undignified second of it.  Afterward, however, I was given a snack.

Lessons Learned:  Drugs are good.  But so are cookies.

True Fact:  On the same day that a doctor first said the word “lymphoma” to me, I received an email telling me that the movie version of my second novel would begin filming in October.  This coincidence seems to indicate that God is a merry prankster.

Lesson Learned:  Not really a big fan of merry pranksters, here.

True Facts:  The movie did not begin filming in October.  Or November.  Or December.  This seems to indicate that Hollywood is a merry prankster as well.

Lesson Learned:  See above.

True Fact:  I have an amazing spouse who always has my back despite the fact that I’m a foul-tempered old crank who’s addicted to cookies.

Lesson Learned:  None.  I already knew that.

True Fact:  My friends aren’t half-bad, either.

Lesson Learned:  Suckers.

True Fact:  Throughout 2009, the first picture that popped up in a Google Images search for “Bradley Denton” was a photo of me kissing Steve Gould.

Lesson Learned:  Make one mistake, and you pay for it the rest of your life.

Anyway, his post, titled Beware of Science Fiction, uses Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Roddenberry, as examples of agnostic or atheistic proponents.  His descriptions are factual, using quotes from the writers in question.  After reading every one of the quotes, my reaction is “Right on!” but he seems to see them as, uh, damning.

He finishes with:

Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!

So, I’m guessing that evidence based science is just right out of the picture, for him.

I laughed when I read the informational paragraph at the bottom of the website which includes:

OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.

In conclusion, I’m making a unilateral deal with him.  He shouldn’t read ANY Science Fiction and I’ll promise never to read his web site again.

(also posted at Steve’s blog, An Unconvincing Narrative)

I just thought I’d mention that Dark Star Books has re-issued my first (okay — so far my only) novel in trade paperback format.

You have no idea how delighted I am and how grateful I am to Tom Knowles for shepherding this project though a lengthy and difficult gestation and birth. Tom’s an old friend who has partnered with a guy who just happens to own a multi-million dollar printing installation. They’re aggressively entering the market with small-run books that can then immediately ramp to print-on-demand and near-instant shipping when the sales call for it. This is likely to be the most survivable business model for small-to-medium publishers in an age when the old business model is dying an agonizing, prolonged death.

Because they’ve almost completely cut out the middle man and aren’t engaging in that monstrous practice where books are destroyed and stripped covers get returned for credit, they can sell at a highly-competitive cover price. And they make extremely high-quality product with great exterior and interior art, printed on acid-free paper, with thick covers and library-quality binding. They’ve got a good line-up of titles already in place, including Robert Asprin’s last novel, ‘No Quarter’. Later this year, we should see John Steakley’s ‘Werewolve$’.

Also, Tom did something almost unheard-of in the publishing biz — He got me and Brad Foster to exchange emails before Brad did the art, to make sure the final cover pleased us both. Brad came up with some neat ideas, including some fun in-jokes with the patches on the jumpsuits that Henry Lee and Star are wearing.

Brad basically nailed it in first draft, except that we had a little back and forth about what Sprocket’s drilling toungue should look like. We decided to step back from showing that, since, well, certain dirty-minded people might think the tip looks like a gigantic penis…

Also, I mentioned that I’d like to see lots of cleavage on the cover. Brad’s one of the Secret Masters of Cleavage, so that worked out okay.I think it’s a perfect cover, especially considering that the book’s being aimed at the YA market.

Tom got me over to watch the print run, which was another wonderful experience. I phone-vidded some of the visit, which I’ll likely post here, once I’ve gotten it edited.

The book is just now coming into stock at Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. It’ll be available unpredictably in stores in small amounts. You can also order any of their titles directly from Dark Star, of course.

I hope this adventure works out for Tom and Dark Star, because he wants to see the sequel, ‘Sprocket Goes International’, in time to print for this next holiday season, and then, hopefully, ‘Sprocket Goes Interstellar’ the year after.

Now all I gotta do is write them.

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We traveled for the holidays visiting mostly family and some friends in Texas. Among these were supposed to be Rory but he wasn’t answering his phone or texts or emails. Then he did.

“I’m completely turned around,” he said. “I’ve flip-flopped my day-night cycle, staying up all night and sleeping all day. That’s why it took so long to respond.”

A likely story. I suspect he was too busy draining some luscious co-ed in the back alleys to check his phone. I mean, here you are sneaking up on someone and your phone goes off. It must make it difficult to hook up, so to speak.

Now, I can’t personally confirm this since business and weather stuff conspired to scoot us out of the state before planned, but just look at that picture and draw your own conclusions.

I guess we’ll know in February. Blind Lemon Denton and the Lemonaids will be playing AggieCon and Rory plays guitar for them. If he shows up during the daylight hours, I guess I’ll have been mistaken.

Or is that Sunscreen SPF 15 X 10^3?

Okay, I’m not going to make Spock get it on with Uhura, but I am going to commit to at least one substantive post a week in 2010.  Let’s see if we can get things moving again.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Petrogypsies

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In celebration of a recent auspicious event, I’m posting the complete text of the original short story that began my first novel, ‘Petrogypsies’, as published in Baen’s Far Frontiers in 1988.

More info to come.

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My apologies for missing my post yesterday — I spent a great weekend in Austin, hanging out with my Wild-Ass NeoPagan Tribe(TM) at the ScotchtoberFest party and seeing Zombieland with She Who Is Awesome and her thrall, Jesse. Then I rode back to CS in a cold, wet miserable drizzle. I’d neglected to bring my foul-weather gear with me because weather.com said there was a 10% chance of rain this weekend. I felt like a drowned kitten by the time I slithered off the bike. Weather.com can go screw themselves.

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Anyhow — I’ve always been a total sucker for orchestral rock. Except for prog-rock, which generally sucks. Saw the Moody Blues live three or four times, and the Metallica thing with the London Symphony Orchestra is also a fav.

Symphonic Goth Metal takes it to new level for me. Tonight we have Within Temptation’s magnum opus, Black Symphony, on the turntable. They got the Metropole Orchestra and a bunch of monks who’d given themselves over to the dark side to play with them one night.

They’re a Dutch band with a long and apparently happy history as a family. Sharon den Adel, their lead singer, has some amazing pipes on her. She’s also a major hottie. Unfortunately, she’s hooked up with her lead guitarist — as all chick singers do — and has even gone so far as to have a child with him in a futile effort to convince me to quit sending her those letters professing my undying adoration.

I had a difficult time deciding which cut from the album to present to you. They range from pretty-damn-metal to pretty-damn-symphonic. I have the album, and highly recommend it to you, especially the version that includes a DVD of the concert.

Click the pic at the top of this post for Jillian, which opens the album after the overture.  I encourage you to surf YouTube for other excellent songs from that night. The cut for Jane Doe isn’t on the US version of the album, and it was the one that got me into them to start with.  It does rock harder than Jillian. The big Frankensteiny guitarist who chases her across the stage in this vid is her main squeeze. I just don’t know what she sees in him.

You can also hit their site. It leads with Utopia, a ballady new song that isn’t metal at all, but is kinda-sorta heart-breaking. It’s a pre-sale song for their upcoming An Acoustic Night at the Theatre. It’s got an orchestra in it, so I’ll have get it, too.

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We all know that writing can be painful. The intense frustration when an idea that was pure genius in our heads translates to vapid merde when we try to put it into words on the screen. The struggle to impose form and structure on a plotline that insists on fracturing into a thousand shards, all of them purest zirconium. The realization that you abruptly suck at this endeavor that is central to your self-regard, that you’ve lost it forever, that all your friends will now know what a dismal fraud you are.

I can’t help you with that part. Cocaine, alcohol, and perverse sex are the prescribed remedies.

However, there is some hope for the physical pains that you’re experiencing. If you write much, your hands hurt fairly constantly now, don’t they? Probably your forearms, too, and your shoulders ache.

Let’s trip back to the halcyon days of yestertyping, when only women were taught how to use a keyboard. Real computers cost five to ten thousand dollars. A mouse was a rodent that you carried around in your shirt pocket, because you were weird.

There was no GUI. There was only one screen color on a black background. There was the command line, and you wrote your novels in WordStar, which was the coolest program on the planet.

Back then, the keyboards were not made for a dollar a day by starving Filipino orphans. They were often designed by obsessive engineers who realized that keyboards were the contact point between their expensive wares and the person who bought them, so they damn well better be good.

Then came Windows (and the Macintosh, but we don’t talk about Macs in polite society).

The paradigm shifted tectonically. Now most people click away their lives rather than typing everything. And computers cost a tenth of what they once did, so keyboards are thrown into the bundle like Happy Meal toys.

And they’re awful. They hurt you badly in the long run if you type a lot.

I’d like to introduce you to the IBM Model M keyboard. If you’re a writer, it’s your new best friend.

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Modern keyboards are made of light plastic and have cheap membrane switches.Two electrical contacts are pressed together when you hit a key. That’s it, that’s all. They have absolutely no tactile feel, so that you don’t really know when you’ve successfully entered a character, until it shows up on the monitor. So you hit hard, every time. The sounds they make are also very loosely related to the process. They have absolutely no ‘touch’.

The Model M has a much more expensive and precise mechanical buckling spring keyswitch. It is tactile and loudly clicky and utterly consistent. You both feel and hear exactly when you’ve typed a character, and when you’ve properly released the key. Fewer missed strokes and fewer inadvertent strokes. The keyboard weighs nearly 5 pounds, so it doesn’t slide around under you, and contains a heavy curved steel plate that makes it absolutely rigid; no bouncing like with cheap plastic boards. They’re virtually indestructible — boards that were made 20 years ago still work as well as the day they came out of the box. You can brain a zombie with one and go right back to typing a minute later with no worries.

As a matter of fact, I’m typing this post on a Model M manufactured on October 26, 1989.

If you’re nothing but a web-surfing sheep, this is all irrelevant to you. If you type a lot, these differences mean the world. If you’ve never used anything but a membrane keyboard you may not believe me about how significant the difference is — it’s like trying to tell somebody about Lamborghinis when all they’ve ever known is their Subaru.

When you switch to a Model M, your subconscious will be reprogrammed. Instead of hitting the keys as hard as possible, you’ll find yourself typing much more delicately, much more accurately, and, usually, noticeably faster.

You’ll hurt less because you’ll be applying less force and doing so more precisely. You will no longer bottom out the keystroke. Less repetitive stress injury, less impact injury.

I own five Model M’s. I find it difficult to type on membrane keyboards now, though my job demands it. It’s like typing into mud.When I get back to my own work machine, which I’ve fitted with a Model M, it’s like dancing.

IBM made many thousands of these boards, for more than a decade. They can be had via Ebay or various vendors for around $50 including shipping. There are a few subtypes with different part numbers. The 1391401 is considered to be the purest version, though even I have some difficulty feeling a difference between it and the other Model M’s.

I know that I may sound a little hyperbolic about this board. But — If you’re a professional writer, or someone who still does lots of keyboarding, this piece of gear can change you life. You’ll hurt less and you’ll enjoy the act of typing more.

Physically, that is. The mental and emotional anguish will still remain.

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Incidentally, the image at the top of my post takes you to the SteamPunk Workshop, where a Model M has been modded to become a functioning work of art. I badly want one of these.

For more detailed info and sales of cleaned-up, guaranteed Model M’s, go to Clicky Keyboards. Especially check out their entertaning FAQs.

The current patent-holder and manufacturer of Model M clones and other buckling-spring boards is Unicomp.The Customizer 101 is their Model M clone. Their line is supposed to be good, and here is where you can get a board with a USB connection, rather than the PS/2 that the originals all have. Also, this is where to get a cool black one, as all of the originals are in beige.

There’s an active forum for people who are even more obsessed about clicky and tactile keyboards at GeekHack. There are many other variations on this technology, including boards with Alps and Cherry keyswitches in several flavors. If you’re not as highly evolved as me, you may actually prefer boards with those different touches. Truthfully, I own an old NorthGate OmniKey Ultra, which has Alps switches. Its touch is divine, though lighter than the Model M.

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So, here is a quickie, to get warmed up and breathe a little life back into my own posting habits.

Science News reports that some very clever people have come up with a laser technique for detecting microbial activity. We can not only use it to, say, detect Martian life from orbit, but even use it to detect life on worlds orbiting other suns! Even better, it uses very inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment. Which means maybe even some enterprising amateurs could conceivably be the first people to discover extraterrestrial life.

How cool is that?

Okay, it’s been completely dead in here for far too long.

I’ve been a near-total hermit since sometime late last year. I blame Obama. But I’m hereby officially re-committing to posting some postings at least once a week. I already have a couple in my head. They may not all be the casual masterpieces that you’ve grown accustomed to seeing from me. But they’ll be something.

I’m kicking off with a new song that I’ve largely finished mixing this morning.

It’s probably the most highly-produced song I’ve done yet, with all sorts of layers and panning and automation envelopes and synths and on and on about stuff you don’t care about.

And, Ghod help me, I smashed it all to hell with compressors and limiters. It just seemed like the kind of tune that called for that. Another sad victim of the Loudness Wars. I left a few transients in there somewhere. Maybe.

I like to think that this one is in the finest tradition of EatOurBrains.

I hope that it’s an easy listen for you.

…Uh… You should play it loud….

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Nothing Else Better to Do

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EDIT on 10-04-09: I’ve just loaded a slight remix of the song, for increased clarity. I brought the vocals forward so that they’re more intelligible, increased the strings’ level for ear candy, and got rid of some mud in the bottom end. I don’t know about you guys, but I usually don’t enjoy having mud in my bottom end.

Hugs to all of you

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