Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka was born and raised in northwest Indiana and spent more than a decade working in various laboratories there before moving to the Pacific Northwest. His short fiction has been nominated for both the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He now works in the videogame industry where he’s a full-time writer at Valve, home of Half-Life, Portal and Dota 2.

His new novel is The Games.

Recently I asked Kosmatka what he was reading. His reply:
I recently spent time up at the Rainforest Writer's Retreat where I was lucky enough to snag a signed copy of Jay Lake's Mainspring, so that's the book I've been reading lately. I was familiar with the premise of the book, and I'd been meaning to read it forever because it sounded so interesting. Basically, it's steampunk to the nth power. The world circles the sun on a brass track, like a kind of celestial clockwork, but the big problem is that the world is slowly winding down. The only thing that can stop it is the key perilous, which must be found and used to rewind the world. I'm about halfway through the book now, and it's a fun, fast-paced read. I feel like it puts an exclamation point on the whole steampunk genre. Another book that I picked up at Rainforest that I'm really looking forward to reading is Brenda Cooper's The Silver Ship and the Sea. That's next on my reading list.
Visit Ted Kosmatka's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue