Dana Stabenow

Edgar Award–winning Dana Stabenow is the author of fifteen novels in her "Kate Shugak" series, three Liam Campbell mysteries, three science-fiction novels, and a stand-alone novel.

She also writes an acclaimed column for Alaska magazine.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I was at the winter meeting of the ALA in Seattle in January, where I had breakfast with Nancy Pearl and Talia Ross, my publisher’s (Holtzbrinck) library marketing manager. I was telling the two of them about a science fiction lit workshop I would be teaching at the Kenai Public Library in March, and how I was using classics (H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy, the Heinlein juveniles, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country) in my syllabus and very few new books because I hadn’t read a lot of new sf or fantasy that I liked.

Well. That was a mistake. Ever since, Talia has been sending me boxes full of Tor books, which I dive into headfirst when they’re dropped off at the door, much to the neglect of my to-read shelf (not to mention the book I’m supposed to be writing). I just finished S.M. Stirling’s The Sky People, a reincarnation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter on Mars as Marc Vitrac on a Venus that reminds me of Heinlein’s Venus in Between Planets. Before that I read Brenda Cooper’s The Silver Ship and the Sea, about a bunch of back-to-the-land space colonists who go to war with latecomers who have been “altered,” all the better to survive the planet. They win, and are left with raising six “altered” children, told in first person by one of the altereds. Some good characters, especially Jenna.

I told Talia it was like turning a drunk loose in a distillery. I just love being a writer.

Visit Dana Stabenow's official website and her Amazon blog.

The Page 69 Test: A Deeper Sleep.

--Marshal Zeringue