Author Ryan Schneider's Blog

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...

Authors and Books with Recognition and Multiple Awards are in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! by Lisa Mason  It should come as no surprise that the authors participating in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle and their books have received recognition and awards in addition to the Philip K Dick Award . Elizabeth Hand has received the Nebula , World Fantasy , Mythopeoic , Tiptree , and International Horror Guild Awards , and her novels have been chosen as New York Times and Washington Post Notable Books . She’s been a Philip K Dick Award Finalist three times. Gwyneth Jones has won two World Fantasy awards , the Children of the Night award , the BSFA award and the Pilgrim award for Science Fiction criticism . Novels of Lisa Mason have been chosen as a New York Times Notable Book , a New York Public Library Recommended Book , and a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book . Kay Kenyon has been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award...

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 Chose the Books for The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! by Lisa Mason As a 2016 PKD Award judge , I had access to the master list of Finalists and Winners going back to 1983, when the award was inaugurated. When Storybundle agreed  to do a Philip K Dick Award Storybundle comprised of Finalists and Winners , I researched the authors on that list. I chose these authors and books because they meet the following criteria: 1. They weren’t dead (that’s a joke); 2. They have an ebook of their Philip K Dick Award Finalist or Winner ; 3. They and their publishers were technically able to participate in StoryBundle’s DRM-free environment. You would be surprised how many authors going back to 1983 couldn’t meet those simple criteria, including the first. I’m delighted and thankful for this list. I’ve read all of the authors’ works, often first as magazine stories, and met several at conventions and parties. I truly encourage you to...

Frontera by Lewis Shiner is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! The Cyberpunk classic and Nebula Award finalist in the revised, definitive edition. Ten years ago the world's governments collapsed, and now the corporations are in control. Houston's Pulsystems has sent an expedition to the lost Martian colony of Frontera to search for survivors. Reese, aging hero of the US space program, knows better. The colonists are not only alive, they have discovered a secret so devastating that the new rulers of Earth will stop at nothing to own it. Reese is equally desperate to use it for his own very personal agenda. But none of them have reckoned with Kane, tortured veteran of the corporate wars, whose hallucinatory voices are urging him to complete an ancient cycle of heroism and alter the destiny of the human race. ''Lewis Shiner's Frontera is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel . . . his pacing is brisk, his scientific extrapol...

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...