UMass Science Fiction Society

We have a minutefund set up to help our club with financial assistance, and our campaign ends in 3 days! Donate if possible, and if not, please share this around :)

A) As you may know, all RSO events were cancelled on Thursday because of the Shelter in Place order. This means that our book club for “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” is going to happen this Thursday (2/25) instead. There will be milk and cookies as a treat.

A bit of a preface: Gail Z. Martin is a fantasy author. There’s a list of all her works at the bottom of the page, where it says “About the author”. She is doing what’s called a blog tour, which means that for this week, she’s writing posts for a bunch of different blogs. Since we run a library devoted to both science fiction and fantasy, I thought that it would be a good idea to invite her to write a post for us. I asked her to tell us about herself and one of her books and she wrote it up in a Question and Answer format. She also provided links to all sorts of free stuff, because she is awesome. Also a copy of The Summoner has also been ordered and should arrive in the library by mid-Novemeber, assuming UMass bureaucracy works(It often doesn’t). If it proves to be popular, we can order the rest of the series. Without further ado, Gail Z. Martin:

Q: What’s your favorite book out of the ones you’ve written? A: Wow—that’s like asking me which of my kids I love the best! I guess I have to say The Summoner because it was the first one to be published and it was a story I had worked on for a long time prior to that. I was so thrilled to walk into a bookstore and see it on the shelves!

Q: Tell us a little bit about the book. A: The Summoner is Book One in The Chronicles of the Necromancer. Tris Drayke’s family is murdered. As he’s running for his life, he comes to realize he has a talent for a very rare type of magic which enables him to intercede between the living and the dead. He has to learn to control that magic before it destroys him in order to avenge his family.

Q: Tell us a little bit about you. A: I’m a full-time author, and so is my husband, Larry N. Martin, who is also my co-author on our steampunk series, Iron & Blood. We have three children. One is an architect in New York City, one is in college at University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, and one is a junior in high school. We have two dogs a golden retriever and a Maltese and a Himalayan cat. When we’re not writing, we like trying out new recipes, traveling, and reading.

Q: Why do you love science fiction? A: I love the possibilities of ‘what if’.  Start a sentence with ‘what if’ and it can take you anywhere—into the past or the future, into alternative histories or other possible presents. Everything starts with that question—and ends in a story!

My Days of the Dead blog tour runs through October 31 with never-before-seen cover art, brand new excerpts from upcoming books and recent short stories, interviews, guest blog posts, giveaways and more! Plus, I’ll be including extra excerpt links for my stories and for books by author friends of mine.

You’ve got to visit the participating sites to get the goodies, just like Trick or Treat!

Details here: http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com/2015/10/22/days-of-the-dead-blog-tour-tricks-treats-and-scary-good-stuff/

Book swag is the new Trick-or-Treat! Grab your envelope of book swag awesomeness from me & 10 authors http://on.fb.me/1h4rIIe before 11/1!

Trick or Treat! Excerpt from my new urban fantasy novel Vendetta set in my Deadly Curiosities world here http://bit.ly/1ZXCPVS Launches Dec. 29

More Treats! Enter to win a copy of Deadly Curiosities! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160181-deadly-curiosities

Treats! Enter to win a copy of Iron & Blood! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/160182-iron-blood

Spooky Treats! Read an excerpt from my Deadly Curiosities short story Buttons here: http://bit.ly/1v5t9Zf

Treats Not Tricks! An excerpt from my superhero story The Breaking Point in the Heroes anthology http://bit.ly/1xiiQB4

More Halloween Goodies! An excerpt from Shadows Of The Infinite by Leona Wisoker http://www.wattpad.com/82431935-the-society-for-the-preservation-of-cj-henderson

Halloween Loot! An excerpt from In The Dying Light http://www.wattpad.com/81420003-the-society-for-the-preservation-of-cj-henderson

About the Author

The UMass Science Fiction Society Book Club is meeting on Thursday Nov. 5th at 7pm in the UMSFS Library. (In the basement of the Campus Center, at the opposite end as the auditorium, there is a door that says WMUA and leads into a hallway. Go to the end of the hallway and turn left. Our room is on the right.)

Want to listen to awesome stories while eating cookies?  Come to the UMass Science Fiction Library at 7 PM on Thursday 10/24, and bring your favorite science fiction or fantasy short stories, or longer works that you could read a section from.  We’ll provide the milk (and Lactaid) and cookies from Sugar Jones.  Original works are also welcome.  If you don’t have anything you want to read, come anyway to just eat cookies and listen!

If you’ve never visited our room before, we’re in Campus Center 103:

Go down the main escalator

Turn 180 degrees

Walk to the far wall

Go through the doorway that says “WMUA Collegian”

Turn left at the end of the short hallway

The UMass Science Fiction Society is holding its first event of the year today, an afternoon playing Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator! If you've ever wanted a turn at a station on the bridge of the Enterprise, this game is for you!

We officially start at 2 PM. You can come by then or any time later to try it out - each session lasts at most an hour. Please bring a laptop running Windows or Linux if you have one. If you don't, come by with whatever you have and we'll try to figure out a way for you to play.

Directions to the club room (Campus Center 103):

Go down the main escalator

Turn 180 degrees

Walk to the far wall

Go through the doorway that says “WMUA Collegian”

Turn left at the end of the short hallway