It’s been months since I’ve done an audiobook recommendation post. That doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed some great listens; it just means I’ve fallen way behind in posting. So this is a round-up post, listing some favorites since last fall.

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore — Audible often has two-for-one sales featuring a limited selection of titles. I take advantage of these, and often find terrific books that I wouldn’t otherwise have known to look for. I think that’s how I discovered this one. It’s an excellent fictionalized story of science, invention, and patents. Edison vs Westinghouse, through the eyes of attorney Paul Cravath.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond — (nonfiction) This one was an eye-opener. The author follows the lives of several individuals over a period of months — both tenants and landlords — using their experiences to examine the forces shaping the structure of home-rental markets in impoverished neighborhoods. It’s an amazing glimpse into the precarious lives of the very poor. This is another title I would not have considered but for the Audible promotion.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg — A history of the gene-editing method known as CRISPR, from those who invented it.

Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson — Another brilliant look into the future by the incomparable KSR. Red Moon assumes the ascendance of the Chinese in lunar colonization, and explores potential near-future existences on both the Earth and the Moon.

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen — I loved this book. I majored in biology in college, with a particular interest in evolution, so this book hit home for me. It looks into evolutionary theory, tracing the development of a new theory on the mechanism of evolution, called horizontal gene transfer, in which the movement of genes occurs across species lines. This one partners nicely with Ed Yong’s “I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life” , reviewed last summer. I wish I could find the time to listen to both of them again.

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking — War has taken new forms and America is not winning. This is a fascinating and eye-opening look at the skilled use of social media as propaganda. If you write near-future #sci-fi or present-day thrillers, read this book.

Ever since Jeffrey Lewis’s novel The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks against the United States came out last summer, people have been recommending it to me.

At last I’ve had a chance to read it, and now I’m recommending it to you.

On Twitter I posted a four-word review: Frightening, excellent, and necessary reading. I’ll add just a bit more here.

Jeffrey Lewis is an academic and the founding publisher of the blog Arms Control Wonk. The 2020 Commission Report is a “speculative novel” written in the form of an official report issued by a commission established to ascertain the historical facts that led to a devastating nuclear attack by North Korea in March of 2020 — just eleven months away in a postulated future.

An official report may sound like dry reading, but it’s riveting. The scenario Lewis develops feels all too realistic, and the characters are the actual people — mostly incompetents — who have somehow, absurdly, been placed in positions of power within the United States.

Here’s hoping we survive until the next election. May we gain enough wisdom as a country to elect competent people into the executive office next time.

Find it at Amazon.

Go here for links to other vendors.

I first “met” Vonda N. McIntyre online, circa 2011. She warmly welcomed me into the writers cooperative, Book View Café, which she had helped establish. It was such an honor getting to know this “big name” writer. Vonda’s 1978 novel, Dreamsnake, had won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Pacific Northwest Booksellers award — at a time when successful young women writers of science fiction were far more rare than they are these days. She also won the 1998 Nebula Award with her novel The Moon and the Sun.

Vonda and I were both website geeks and before long we were working together to develop a new online store for Book View Café.

Eventually, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to meet Vonda in person, over a fine lunch at a shoreline restaurant in her native Seattle. I got to see her again at the Spokane Worldcon where she was guest of honor. Over the years, she’s been hugely supportive of me and my work, something I deeply appreciate.

Just this past week, horrible news arrived. Vonda has been diagnosed with inoperable metastatic pancreatic cancer. Grim, though not quite imminent, as she described it. There is time, and there are treatments to prolong the time and, I hope, to provide quality of life.

None of us knows if we will be here tomorrow, but most of us don’t have to face such a stern diagnosis. My heart goes out to Vonda, and it’s my hope that we will have her with us into the future, and that we will see her next novel before too long.

Find Vonda’s novels here at Book View Café, and while you’re there note the minimalism of her posted bio. That’s so Vonda N. McIntyre. 🙂

This post is adapted and personalized (with permission), from Gail Carriger’s blog. See the original here.

Did you know you can get your local library or school or university library to get my books?

Like Gail, I grew up in my little local library and read just about all the science fiction books they ever had on the shelves. It was always a great day when my mom would drive us to the next town over, and we could visit their larger library. But I never did learn to request books in those days. I was too shy for that. But you don’t have to be!

You can request my books — most of them — in print versions, and some in ebook editions. By requesting them, you’re helping me by increasing my sales, and I like to think you’re helping other readers to discover my work — and who knows, they might enjoy it!

I am told that an actual request from a library card-carrying patron has an immense impact on library stock. This is especially important with my independent novels — that is, everything other than the Red trilogy. In theory, Simon & Schuster has a sales department tasked with getting books into libraries, but my Mythic Island Press books have only me.

Donating books is not the answer. If you visit Gail’s original post and check the comments, librarians explain that donated books incur much higher labor costs than those ordered through library vendors, so they often end up in the “for sale” bin instead of on the shelves.

How to request your library carry my books…
On your library’s website (or in person) there is usually a form where you can request a book be purchased.

The link could be called anything from “suggest a title” to “ask us to purchase.”

Here’s Gail’s explanation of how to request the digital version:

Hopefully your library is connected to OverDrive…

1. Log in to your library’s OverDrive site. Use your library card number and pin.
2. Search for the book by title.
3. Add titles you can recommend.
4. Hover over the cover, Recommend
5. You can choose either to be notified or to be placed on hold & enter your email addy.
6. Recommend this title.

It’s pretty self explanatory but a librarian can guide you through it.

You can do this for my books and for books from other authors you enjoy.

Thank you!

Planetside by Michael Mammay

Most of my audiobook listening time happens when I’m doing chores — yardwork, cooking, cleaning — dull stuff that I can do on autopilot while I’m focused on the story. So the ultimate compliment I can pay to an audiobook is that it inspired me to do all the chores I could think of! Michael Mammay’s debut novel, Planetside, did that for me.

On its surface, Planetside is science fiction — it’s a military novel set in and around an alien planet in a story world where interstellar travel is common — but change just a few elements and it might be set in Afghanistan. It’s structured as a mystery. A colonel, close to retirement, is sent to a remote planet to investigate the disappearance of a young officer. There are elements of at least a couple of classic novels that I won’t name since I don’t want to provide any potential spoilers — let me just say that I found the storytelling engrossing. I finished the audiobook in about two days — and completed a lot of yard work! 🙂

Highly recommended.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

I just got back from an eight-day vacation and I’m frantically trying to catch up, so instead of writing an actual blog post I’m just going to echo what I said on Twitter:

Tweet #1:
This is not a good day to talk about great books, but if I don’t mention it now I’ll forget. So…

Tweet #2:
I just finished the audiobook of I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It’s about microbes: their ubiquity, their variety, their chemistry, and their interactions with the web of life that is Earth, including all of us.

(Hat tip to Vonda N. McIntyre for bringing this title to my attention.)

Tweet #3:
Highly recommended, and lots of ideas for you near-future SF writers. The world we live in is fascinating! Respect it, cherish it, preserve it.

Tweet #4:
Also, if you haven’t already, read KSR’s Aurora which has much to do with microbes and their contributions to ecosystems.
/end

After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid (audiobook)

OMG, I loved this audiobook!

After On was published last August and I have to confess that I didn’t hear anything about it when it came out and I was not familiar with its author Rob Reid. I decided to check it out because it kept appearing in the “also bought” recommendation list at Amazon, and because it was near-future and sounded like it was going to engage in themes similar to my own work — you know, near-future manipulative AI, that sort of thing.

I listened to the sample and I was still sort of “Hmmm…” But if I didn’t like it, I could always return it, so what-Ev-er!

And yes, so to-tally worth it. (I’m trying to capture the voice of one of the characters here.)

This is a smart, funny, ingenious, and informative novel. As the title suggests, it’s set in Silicon Valley and follows several entrepreneurial (OMG, I spelled that word right on the first try!) characters as they try to stay afloat in their highly competitive world while striving to come up with the NEXT BIG THING.

There is lot of informative discussion in this novel. EULAs and privacy and Pascal’s Wager, venture capital, how to make a fortune while your company fails, the implications of “Super AI”, Twitter lynch mobs, fiction as thought experiments that might be applied to life, Fermi’s paradox, people-people, and people who aren’t so good with people, just for a few examples.

It’s possible some of this might be a little tedious to read, I don’t know. I found it all fascinating to listen to.

The audiobook is read by a large and very talented cast. They put a lot of effort into their performance, and I found the story fun and fascinating.

Highly recommended.

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley

There seems to have been a good deal of publicity around this novel when it came out last October, but I missed all of it and didn’t take notice of Ka until I heard Jonathan Strahan praising it. The novel is published by Saga Press, which charges a very reasonable $7.99 for the ebook, so I picked it up, read it immediately, and I’m now perplexed that Ka did not appear on either the Hugo or Nebula ballots. This is a wonderful novel.

Ka is a story told from the point of view of a crow, whose name is “Dar Oakley” and who, by strange circumstance, comes to live over a span of time encompassing two to three thousand years. The stories he takes part in and the people he comes to know are endlessly fascinating.

Not since childhood have I been interested in stories told from an animal’s point of view, but this one was so highly praised I had to look into it, and I was hooked from the first page.

From a personal perspective — that of a writer forever struggling to comprehend the marketplace — Ka astonishes me for the sheer bravery required of its author to even conceptualize a novel like this — a novel about a crow! — and the confidence to believe, during the long hard writing process, that there would be a market for it. I hope there’s a market for it! I hope it’s doing well. And I’m very glad there are still great writers willing to take chances of this kind.

For more about the novel, see Gary K. Wolfe’s review at Locus.

Find it at Amazon here.

I usually provide a universal link to other vendors, but the link site wasn’t working. Sorry!

I don’t write only science fiction. I’ve also written two fantasy novels. The first of the pair, The Dread Hammer, is now part of

The Myths and Legends Fantasy Storybundle

Curated by Kevin J. Anderson, it’s available starting today!

Directly from Kevin, here’s a description of the Storybundle:

Follow this link to check out all the details.

I’ve read several really interesting articles lately. Here they are, if you’d like to check them out:

“The Hunt for Wonder Drugs at the North Pole” by Kea Krause in The Atlantic
Remember how bioprospecting in the Arctic was a background element in my novel Going Dark? This article is about the challenges and potential of real world Arctic bioprospecting.

“Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?” by Adam Frank, also in The Atlantic
Oh sure, this sounds like supermarket tabloid material but in fact this is an utterly fascinating planetary-science article. The author tries to answer the question of what evidence might remain from some hypothetical long-ago civilization.

“Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day” by Jim Robbins in The New York Times
Did you know that a stream of viruses is “circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel?” I didn’t. Another fascinating article, and a testament to the awe-inspiring complexity of life on Earth

Finally, this has been a terrible week for the island of Kauai which has suffered record-setting levels of rain. (Don’t worry about me — I live on Maui and we’ve been fine.) It turns out there is a buffalo ranch on Kauai, and several animals were swept away by a flooding river, which led to the surreal scene of paniolo (Hawaii cowboys) rounding up buffalo on the beach at Hanalei. Take a look at the user-contributed video (second video on the page) here at Hawaii News Now.

Aloha and best wishes for a swift recovery to our neighbor island of Kauai!