Author Ryan Schneider's Blog

Knight Moves by Walter Jon Williams is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! A Philip K Dick Award-nominated novel. Eight hundred years ago Doran Falkner gave humanity the stars, and he now lives with his regrets on a depopulated Earth among tumbledown ruins and ancient dreams brought to life by modern technology. But word now comes that alien life has been discovered on a distant world, life so strange and impossible that the revelation of its secrets could change everything. A disillusioned knight on the chessboard of the gods, Doran must confront his own lost promise, his lost love, and his lost humanity, to make the move that will revive the fortunes both of humans and aliens . . . “ Knight Moves is an engrossing and evocative read, a tale of immortality and love and death rendered in a style that reminds me more than a little of the early Roger Zelazny. Williams’ people are intriguing and sympathetic, and his portrait of an Earth left transf...

Acts Of Conscience by William Barton is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! This is the story of Gaetan du Cheyne, Class 10 Spatial Machinery Mechanic at the great spaceship refit station known as Stardock. Gaetan du Cheyne. No mother, no father, no children, no wife, no friends, no home, no nothing. Just a job. An empty man, a hollow man, paid well enough for his complex skills that, when he's not consuming a steady diet of net porn, he gets to play the stock market. Until, one fine day, he finds himself in possession of a prototype FTL starship, and goes out among the worlds in search of... something. Anything. Maybe only the lost, empty dreams that were all he had as a child, dreams that deserted him as an adult.  What he finds, in the end, if you can understand the man, if you can understand his lost dreams, may change you forever, if you're lucky. Amazon.com Review Science fiction and fantasy have antiheros aplenty. Think Thomas Covenant, Fr...

How I Became the Curator of The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle by Lisa Mason A writer-acquaintance who was acting as the Curator of a Storybundle earlier this year invited me to participate in his bundle. I gladly did, having heard about Storybundle.com and all the good things the website does for readers and authors alike. I love the Storybundle website, how they’ve set things up and their commitment to all things writing. Storybundle is a major player in the new independent publishing revolution and works well with readers’ passion for ebooks. After the first bundle was done, and performed well, I began communicating with Storybundle, letting them know that I have an ebook backlist of previously published books and stories and that I’d been asked to serve as a judge for the 2016 The Philip K Dick Award. Storybundle, ever alert for new bundle opportunities, was curious about my role as a judge. We’re slowly working out the details of how I may curate...

Summer of Love by Lisa Mason is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist. A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year. The year is 1967 and something new is sweeping across America: good vibes, bad vibes, psychedelic music, psychedelic drugs, anti-war protests, racial tension, free love, bikers, dropouts, flower children. An age of innocence, a time of danger. The Summer of Love. San Francisco is the Summer of Love , where runaway flower children flock to join the hip elite and squares cruise the streets to view the human zoo. Lost in these strange and wondrous days, teenager Susan Bell, alias Starbright, has run away to San Francisco to find her troubled best friend. Her path will cross with Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, a strange and beautiful young man who has journeyed farther than she could ever imagine. With the help of Ruby A. Maverick, a feisty half-black, half-white hip merchant, Susan and Chi discover a love...

How I Became a 2016 Philip K. Dick Award Judge by Lisa Mason After my Omni story, Tomorrow’s Child , optioned and then sold outright to Universal Studios , I went off for some years to study screenplay writing. I wrote half a dozen, including Tesla: A Worthy of His Time , now an ebook. As generous as the people were who helped me with the Tomorrow’s Child deal, the Hollywood Machine is even more difficult to deal with than New York Publishing. Anyway, writing prose is my first love. When the e-book revolution took off in 2010, I devoted time to uploading Summer of Love , The Gilded Age , a number of my longer previously published stories, a story collection Strange Ladies: 7 Stories of previously published short fiction, an urban fantasy, The Garden of Abracadabra , and a historical romantic suspense, Celestial Girl (A Lily Modjeska Mystery) . Four years of relaunching into ebook publishing just wasn’t enough, though, and I returned to my roots: wri...

Dark Seeker by K.W. Jeter is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! His son is dead... Or that's what he believed. Caught up in the lethal madness of a Manson-like cult, Tyler has lost everything that once mattered to him. Out of prison, on a strict regimen of medications to keep the demons inside his head from returning, he knows he's always one small step away from returning to that dark place and its horrors. So when his ex-wife emerges from the shadows into which she had fled, and tells him that their son is still alive, kidnapped by another former member of the murderous group, Tyler has some tough, soul-threatening decisions to make. He can take the safe route that will keep him sane and alive, and just assume that his ex-wife is lost in some psychotic delusion about their dead son. Or he can take the risk that maybe -- just maybe -- she's somehow telling the truth. He can stop taking the medications that the doctors give him, and go back into th...

What Is the Philip K. Dick Award? The Philip K. Dick Award Storybundle The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.  The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust . The award ceremony is sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. The award was inaugurated in 1983 after the untimely death of Philip K. Dick on March 2, 1982 of a stroke at the age of fifty-three. Thomas Disch (the author, now deceased), David G. Hartwell (the editor and anthologist), Paul S. Williams (Dick's longtime friend and a music journalist), and Charles N. Brown (the founder and publisher of Locus Magazine, also deceased) helped found the award. The current administrators are Patrick Lo Brutto (an editor), John Silbersack (a literary agent), and Gordon Van Gelder (the publisher of The ...

The Cipher by Kathe Koja is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! THE CIPHER is Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel: the story of Nicholas, a failed poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, who discover a strange hole in the storage room down the hall: "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." At first it’s a curiosity, a joke - the Funhole. But then the experiments start. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says no—but from the first, they’re not in control. And the experiments turn to obsession, and violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole. The Cipher was the winner of the 1991 Bram Stoker Award as well as a Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award , and was named one of io9's Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm . Here’s ...

Why Is Philip K Dick Considered Iconic? The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle Unlike pulp genre science fiction of the nineteen-fifties, featuring spaceships and macho ship captains and bug-eyed aliens, Philip K Dick explored philosophical, sociological, political, and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments , and altered states of consciousness . In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology . He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse , paranoia , s chizophrenia , and transcendental experiences. He was a breath of fresh air to his fellow authors and SF readers of the nineteen-sixties and seventies and remains an inspiration and influence to this day. His high concepts have translated well into other media. Eleven popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner , Total Re...