Leigh Douglass Brackett Hamilton (1915-1978) was an American author, particularly of science fiction. She was also a screenwriter, known for her work on famous films such as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Brackett was first published in her mid-twenties. Her first published science fiction story was "Martian Quest", which appeared in the February 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Her earliest years as a writer (1940–1942) were her most productive in numbers of stories written.
In 1946, Brackett married science fiction author Edmond Hamilton.
Most of Brackett's science fiction can be characterized as space opera or planetary romance. Almost all of her planetary romances take place within a common invented universe, the Leigh Brackett Solar System, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s–1950s. Mars thus appears as a marginally habitable desert world, populated by ancient, decadent, and mostly humanoid races; Venus as a primitive, wet jungle planet, occupied by vigorous, primitive tribes and reptilian monsters.
Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. The movie won the Hugo Award in 1981.
You can find out more information about Leigh Brackett at Internet Speculative Fiction Database and Wikipedia
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
What is a book?
Wesley Allison is a writer and had this great post on his blog recently.
There has been a lot of discussion about ebooks destroying the publishing industry, and many people crying about the demise of the book. It kind of begs the question, "what is a book?" Is a book a collection of paper with a binding, or is it a collection of thoughts and ideas and language? I think Amazon gets it right in their Kindle commercial when the actor says "this IS a real book."
I think the big problem for the publishing industry is that they have been trying to sell paper, when they should have been trying to sell thoughts and ideas and language. Paper books are just the medium. We should no more bemoan their loss than we did VHS tape-- well maybe a bit more, they have been around for half a millennium or so. Still, no one cried that VHS tapes were going away in favor of DVD. We knew that it was what's on the media that was important. The same is true for the printed page. It's not the paper and ink. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: "It's the words, stupid."
You can read his blog at: http://amathar.blogspot.com
You can also check out his books on Smashwords including a great freebie His Robot Girlfriend
There has been a lot of discussion about ebooks destroying the publishing industry, and many people crying about the demise of the book. It kind of begs the question, "what is a book?" Is a book a collection of paper with a binding, or is it a collection of thoughts and ideas and language? I think Amazon gets it right in their Kindle commercial when the actor says "this IS a real book."
I think the big problem for the publishing industry is that they have been trying to sell paper, when they should have been trying to sell thoughts and ideas and language. Paper books are just the medium. We should no more bemoan their loss than we did VHS tape-- well maybe a bit more, they have been around for half a millennium or so. Still, no one cried that VHS tapes were going away in favor of DVD. We knew that it was what's on the media that was important. The same is true for the printed page. It's not the paper and ink. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: "It's the words, stupid."
You can read his blog at: http://amathar.blogspot.com
You can also check out his books on Smashwords including a great freebie His Robot Girlfriend
Thursday, June 23, 2011
News- USA Today eReader Review
USA Today has a review of 5 e-readers posted.
"All five have black-and-white screens that are about half the size of a paperback book. They can connect wirelessly to the Internet for e-book downloads. I didn't look closely at battery life, because with one exception, they all claim more than a month of use. The company time machine was occupied."
"All five have black-and-white screens that are about half the size of a paperback book. They can connect wirelessly to the Internet for e-book downloads. I didn't look closely at battery life, because with one exception, they all claim more than a month of use. The company time machine was occupied."
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
New Release- Special Service Patrol
We are excited to announce that we are releasing "Special Service Patrol by Sewell Peaslee Wright"This is a compilation of all of the John Hanson series.
It includes the following titles:
The Forgotten Planet
The Terrible Tentacles of L-472
The Dark Side of Antri
The Ghost World
The Man from 2071
The God in the Box
The Terror from the Depths
Vampires of Space
Priestess of the Flame
The Death-Traps of FX-31
This is a great chance to get all 10 titles in one ebook!
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Author of the Week Mack Reynolds
About Mack Reynolds:
Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983) also wrote under the pseudonyms of Dallas Ross , Mark Mallory , Clark Collins , Dallas Rose , Guy McCord , Maxine Reynolds , and Bob Belmont.
Most of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted many things which have come to pass, including pocket computers and a worldwide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.
Reynolds was also the first author to write an original novel based upon the 1966-1969 NBC television series Star Trek. The book, Mission to Horatius (1968), was aimed at young readers. In 1972, he used the name 'Maxine Reynolds' on two romantic suspense novels, House in the Kasbah and Home of the Inquisitor.
Several of his last books are credited as co-authored with Dean Ing. When Reynolds knew he had a brief time to live, he tried to write enough to provide an income for his wife after his passing. To this end, he wrote as many novel outlines as he could, with the arrangement that Ing would finish them.
For more information you can check him out on: Internet Speculative Fiction Database
or on Wikipedia
Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983) also wrote under the pseudonyms of Dallas Ross , Mark Mallory , Clark Collins , Dallas Rose , Guy McCord , Maxine Reynolds , and Bob Belmont.
Most of Reynolds' stories took place in Utopian societies, many of which fulfilled L. L. Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto used worldwide as a universal second language. His novels predicted many things which have come to pass, including pocket computers and a worldwide computer network with information available at one's fingertips.
Many of his novels were written within the context of a highly mobile society in which few people maintained a fixed residence, leading to "mobile voting" laws which allowed someone living out of the equivalent of a motor home to vote when and where they chose.
Reynolds was also the first author to write an original novel based upon the 1966-1969 NBC television series Star Trek. The book, Mission to Horatius (1968), was aimed at young readers. In 1972, he used the name 'Maxine Reynolds' on two romantic suspense novels, House in the Kasbah and Home of the Inquisitor.
Several of his last books are credited as co-authored with Dean Ing. When Reynolds knew he had a brief time to live, he tried to write enough to provide an income for his wife after his passing. To this end, he wrote as many novel outlines as he could, with the arrangement that Ing would finish them.
For more information you can check him out on: Internet Speculative Fiction Database
or on Wikipedia
Monday, June 20, 2011
News- Harry Potter
Is it true? is JK Rowling going to finally release an official ebook version of the Harry Potter Series? There is speculation that it might be so because of the following post on Youtube.
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