David Walton

David Walton is a science fiction and fantasy author with a growing number of novels in publication. His first, Terminal Mind, won the 2008 Philip K. Dick award for best paperback original novel.

Walton's latest novel is The Genius Plague.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Walton's reply:

The books I'm currently reading are Infomocracy, by Malka Older, and Noumenon, by Marina Lostetter.  I had wanted to read Infomocracy for some time, because I liked the idea of exploring a new political concept.  The book explores the idea of "micro-democracy", where every group of 100,000 people around the world gets to vote on which one of a set of available governments they want, once every ten years.  I'm most of the way through the book now, and enjoying it -- great mystery, great characters, and interesting political concepts to consider.  Noumenon I just started, but it hooked me right from the beginning, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

Other books I've enjoyed recently are N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy; Version Control, by Dexter Palmer; and The Boy on the Bridge, by M.R. Carey, which was every bit as good as The Girl With All The Gifts.  The Broken Earth trilogy raises a lot of difficult issues about groups of people who are mistreated by people in power, and what happens, or what should happen, when the power dynamic shifts the other way.  Version Control covers a lot of interesting ground, including the impacts of Internet technology on social interactions and dating websites, but it's ultimately a time travel novel.  Unlike most such novels, however, the time traveler--just like everyone else--has no memory of the previous timeline once a new one is made.  We as readers therefore get to see several possible versions of the characters' lives, even though the characters themselves don't--and can't--know that there has been more than one.

Visit David Walton's website.

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