Tom Purdom, Lover & Fighter

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It's coming soon, the book I've spent many years yearning for -- Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons, the first collection of Tom Purdom's short fiction.

How highly do I regard Tom's fiction?  So highly that I wrote the introduction to the collection -- and I hate writing introductions.  They're a lot of work.  But these stories deserve enormous praise, so I was glad to do it.

I'll be posting more about this collection as it comes available.  In the meantime, here's one paragraph from my introduction:

The very best example of this is the first story in this book, “Fossil Games,”  a tale of posthumans whose intelligence is so highly enhanced that in conversation they’ll switch between machine-generated and music-based languages in order to convey nuances of mood and yet so outclassed by their contemporaries that they must flee Earth in search of a sanctuary for inferior minds.  It is a cascade of brilliant ideas worthy of Greg Egan or Stephen Baxter at their best.  On my first reading, I could all but hear the plates of my skull creaking as my brain swelled with the effort of following his characters’ thinking.  Yet the writing is smooth and the narrative flows naturally from beginning to end.  It is a genuine tour de force and a terrific introduction to the pleasures of Purdom’s fiction.

And here's the table of contents:
 

       Introduction by Michael Swanwick

        “Fossil Games”

        “Haggle Chips”

        “Dragon Drill” “Canary Land”

        “Research Project”

        “Sheltering”

        “Bonding with Morry”

        “Sepoy”

        “Legacies”

        “A Response from EST17”

        “The Path of the Transgressor”

        “The Mists of Time”

Lovers & Fighters, Starships & Dragons will be available in print on demand and e-book formats from Fantastic Books.  will be launched in February at Boskone in Boston.  Tom Purdom will be in attendance, so if you're going to be there, you really should pick up a copy and get it autographed. 


And on an unrelated note . . .

The judging for this year's Godless Atheist Christmas Card Competition is winding down.  The results will be posted here, as they come available.

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