Author Ryan Schneider's Blog

This Author Spotlight features Kay Kenyon author of Queen of the Deep Kay Kenyon's latest novels are the fantasies Queen of the Deep , about an enchanted ship, both a colossal steam vessel and a Renaissance kingdom; and A Thousand Perfect Things , about a Victorian woman's bid for forbidden powers in an altered India of magic. Her quartet, The Entire and The Rose, was hailed by The Washington Post as “A splendid fantasy quest as compelling as anything by Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip Jose Farmer or yes, J. R. R. Tolkien." Bright of the Sky was among Publishers Weekly's top 150 books of 2007. Her books have been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award and the John W. Campbell award. She is a founding member of the Write on the River conference in Wenatchee, Washington. 1.How did you get into writing and why do you write? I began writing fiction after careers in copy writing and urban planning. One seemed too superficial and...

Maximum Ice by Kay Kenyon (PKD Finalist) is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! They thought Earth would always abide. But it hadn't, not at all . . . . Zoya Kundara has lived on the space vessel Star Road for 250 years. As Ship Mother, she is awakened from Deep Sleep in times of crisis, providing counsel to generations of its Romany crew. Now the starship has returned home, only to discover an Earth on the verge of extinction, blanketed in a crystalline substance called Ice. But it's not ice. This pearl-white mantle is a grand and mysterious ecology of information-bearing crystals. And it is relentlessly enclosing the last free lands. To find a home for her crew, Zoya must approach the denizens of this strange new Earth. She will discover the Ice Nuns, who seek sole control of the physics-defying crystals; people huddled like moles in underground techno-warrens; and the snow witches, creatures of Ice, both mad and prophetic . . . and one snow w...