It’s been been quite a year for audiophiles! The entire Uncommon Series is now available in audio format, the Cumulus audiobook comes out today, and the Neon Fever Dream audiobook is in production and should be available within six weeks or so. Jennifer O’Donnell really brings the characters to life in her narration and the award-winning production team at Brick Shop Audio has been great to work with.
If you haven’t read it yet, Cumulus is a fast-paced science fiction story with a diverse cast set in a near-future San Francisco Bay Area ravaged by economic inequality and persistent surveillance. It’s been praised by folks like Tim O’Reilly, David Brin, Businessweek, Ars Technica, Popular Science, TechCrunch, io9, GeekDad and others. I’ve been shocked and delighted by how the story seems to be resonating and am donating the first six months of proceeds to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Chapter 510 to support a free and open internet and literacy programs for underprivileged youth in Oakland. You can find out more about the inspiration behind the story here and what I learned from the experience of writing it here.
Two weeks ago I visited Park City to speak at the Future in Review conference, a gathering focused on important tech trends and regularly attended by Silicon Valley luminaries. It was a great community to connect with and I met amazing folks working on everything from fighting international human trafficking, to creating software that enables animal communication and hardware to monitor marine life in the deepest oceans. Every year they host a science fiction author to talk about the far future and it was humbling to follow in the footsteps in some of my favorite writers like Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley-Robinson, and Cory Doctorow. Berit Anderson, founder of the new hybrid scifi/tech journalism publication Scout, and I discussed the technologies that will shape the next few decades, Elon Musk’s recent Mars announcement, the intersection of geopolitics and tech, and how we’re rocketing towards an unprecedented artistic Renaissance.
Finally, I’m getting momentum on the rough draft of a new novel. It was a rocky start but the story seems to have grown some legs. I can’t wait to see where the characters take it. Now, time to get back to work…
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