What is Edward Ashton reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Edward Ashton, author of Antimatter Blues: A Mickey7 Novel.

His entry begins:

I’m currently working my way through Children of Memory, the third installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series. The thing I love about Tchaikovsky’s work in general, and about these books in particular, is that he’s able to put together compelling adventures filled with clearly drawn and engaging characters, while simultaneously twisting his readers’ brains into knots exploring deep questions about the nature of sentience and what it might mean to different types of minds.

It’s distressingly common in science fiction to see alien intelligences portrayed as more or less humans with too few eyeballs or too many limbs. Tchaikovsky’s genius is to...[read on]

About Antimatter Blues, from the publisher:

Edward Ashton's Antimatter Blues is the thrilling follow up to Mickey7 in which an expendable heads out to explore new terrain for human habitation.

Summer has come to Niflheim. The lichens are growing, the six-winged bat-things are chirping, and much to his own surprise, Mickey Barnes is still alive—that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believes that the colony’s creeper neighbors are holding an antimatter bomb, and that Mickey is the only one who’s keeping them from using it. Mickey’s just another colonist now. Instead of cleaning out the reactor core, he spends his time these days cleaning out the rabbit hutches. It’s not a bad life.

It’s not going to last.

It may be sunny now, but winter is coming. The antimatter that fuels the colony is running low, and Marshall wants his bomb back. If Mickey agrees to retrieve it, he’ll be giving up the only thing that’s kept his head off of the chopping block. If he refuses, he might doom the entire colony. Meanwhile, the creepers have their own worries, and they’re not going to surrender the bomb without getting something in return. Once again, Mickey finds the fate of two species resting in his hands. If something goes wrong this time, though, he won’t be coming back.

Visit Edward Ashton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mickey7.

Q&A with Edward Ashton.

The Page 69 Test: Antimatter Blues.

Writers Read: Edward Ashton.

--Marshal Zeringue