ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. — We’re at Tropicana Field, my son and I, watching as Anthony Santander strikes out swinging to end the top of the fourth inning. He’s the 12th Oriole in a row to make an out. Drew Rasmussen is, at the moment, throwing a perfect game for the Tampa Bay Rays. It’s early, but another inning or two like this and things will be very interesting, indeed.
My son, Rich, has been my companion at a hundred or more of these Sunday matinee baseball games in the Trop over the years. He’s 53 years old. He’s a baseball fan. He has Down syndrome.
Set on a near-future Earth and on the alien homeworld of S’hudon, Alien Day explores murderous sibling rivalries, old-school mercantile colonialism, ambition, greed, and the saving strength that can emerge from reluctant heroes called to do the right thing despite the odds.
Two award-winning writers take us on a romp through time, space and Ancient Rome as The Wandering Warriors tells the alternate-history story of a 1940s barnstorming baseball team that’s led by a fictional version of retired baseball player and spy Moe Berg and finds itself transported from rural Illinois to Ancient Rome in 210 AD, just after the death of famous emperor Septimius Severus.
A powerful and poignant collection of memorable stories from an award-winning storyteller, Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination is charming, action-packed, frightening, and thoughtful by turn. In these nine stories of determination, seemingly ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances as they confront their fears and embrace their challenges on a near-future Earth or an alternate-history past or even on a far distant alien world.
A dazzling display of history as it might have been, this impressive array of award-winning writers explore the histories that never were, from Ancient Rome to Imperial China and much, much more. The book features classic alternate-history stories by Karen Joy Fowler, Kathleen Goonan, Gregory Benford, Nisi Shawl, Harry Turtledove, Michael Bishop, Lisa Goldstein, Alan Smale, Louise Marley, Maureen McHugh, Michaela Roessner, Rich Larson, Sheila Finch, Ben Loory, Walter Jon Williams, Nicholas DiChario, Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn, and editor Rick Wilber.
Award-winning author Rick Wilber’s fictional versions of famous baseball player and World War II spy Moe Berg have been entertaining readers of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine for years. In this collection of alternate-history stories, Wilber’s fictional Moe Berg puts down his ball and bat and goes to work for a mysterious superspy woman as they work to save America from a German atom bomb.
This innovative ebook is in production from Kendall Hunt and should be available for Fall 2017. It’s an introductory textbook for students interested in mass communications and for instructors interested in teaching students the history, current structure, and possible futures for the mass media. The book has chapters on books, newspapers and magazines, television, film, social media, libel law and ethics, media effects, journalism, public relations, advertising and more. A website for the book offers live links to updates and samples of content from television and film clips to sound bites to historic books in digital form and much more. The textbook’s goal is to inform the students and help them become media-literate, critical consumers of the media.
Peter Holman is a freelance sweeper. The year 2030 sees a new era in social media. Sweepcasting, a multisensory interface that can convey every thought, touch, smell, sight, and sound, can immerse the audience in another person’s experience.
By fate, chance, or some darker design, Peter is perfectly positioned to be the one human to document the arrival of the aliens, the S’hudonni.
Modern Media Writing, co-authored with Dr. Randy Miller, a colleague of Rick’s at the University of South Florida, is a college textbook for beginning media writers in Mass Communications and Journalism departments. The authors are at work on a new edition of the popular textbook.
A few years ago my friend Ben Bova, one of the most honored writers in science fiction and a very knowledgeable baseball fan, proposed that we work together on a fictional retelling of the famous baseball player and spy Moe Berg. Ben had a movie in mind and we worked up a screen treatment that prompted some interest in Hollywood. Ultimately, that came to nothing; but it did get me started thinking about Berg, one of the more interesting personalities to ever play baseball.
One of Rick’s latest books is an anthology he has edited for Tachyon Publishing. The anthology gave Rick a chance to combine his two major writing and teaching interests: science fiction and the mass media.
Set on the gulf coast of Florida and the Cayman Islands, this novel provides a unique blend of modern mystery thriller and baseball narrative. It tells the story of Felicity Lindsay, a small-town police officer who finds a battered murder victim on the beach. Her curiosity about the crime eventually leads Felicity and her father, the alcoholic manager of the local major-league baseball team, into a deadly confrontation with a drug cartel.
During his long baseball career, Del Wilber caught for the Red Sox, Cardinals and Phillies; managed 6 minor league teams; scouted for 4 major league clubs; and served as third base coach for the Senators. Written by his son, Rick, this elegant biographical memoir recounts Del Wilber’s life from the unique perspective of a son who grew up in major league dugouts, experienced the joys and hardships that go along with having a big-league dad, and served as his father’s family caregiver as he became terminally ill.
Cold ... cold is all Melissa O’Malley feels, growing up in the frigid expanses of rural Minnesota. The one thing keeping her warm is the obeah talent she has inherited from her island mother, who mysteriously left when Melissa was only five. Bright, beautiful, athletic, and extremely talented, Melissa is raised by her father, Melchior, and discovers her obeah when her father brings home a deer carcass. Upon touching the deer, Melissa, in a moment of electric clarity, experiences the deer's final moments before death.
Rick’s novel To Leuchars (Wildside, 2000), which gathered together a novel’s worth of his previously published S’hudonni stories, was called a “minor masterpiece” on SFSite.com.
Peter Holman would become a central figure in a power struggle of Galactic proportions, a man whose fate dictated the fates of worlds. And in the end he’ll pay a price for his ambition that no man could bear to pay.
Rick Wilber’s collection of baseball short stories and essays, Where Garagiola Waits, was a finalist for the Dave Moore Award for Most Important Baseball Book of 1999.
Ideal for aspiring journalists, this book offers advice on basic copy editing, how to construct and weave “building-blocks” into a seamless, publishable whole and shortcuts for identifying and smoothing weak passages and rough spots.
Magazine Feature Writing has been a standard college textbook for students interested in writing for magazines since it first came out in 1994. The book is currently out of print and Rick hopes to write a new edition sometime soon. The book is available through Amazon and other online booksellers.
Florida has been home to a large number of science fiction’s brightest stars over the years, and their work has often included the state as an integral part of the setting. Editors Wilber and Mathews have selected 16 stories, including new stories as well as classics, ranging from comic glimpses of alien lifestyles to dystopian images of our future, and from science fiction and fantasy to the literary mainstream.
