Current News About Our Honored Guests

Well, the BIG news is that Charles Sheffield and Nancy Kress will be married on January 10th. As Charles states in his message:

Nancy Kress and I will marry in January, with the preliminary random chaos that implies. We are simultaneously selling her house in New York, moving her effects to Maryland, adding an extension to my house, attending cons Philcon, then Chattacon the week after the wedding), and in my case going over to England with my children at Christmas for my mother’s 95th birthday. Nancy will spend Christmas with her parents in Buffalo, a last visit before they presumably disown her completely because of the forthcoming unsuitable alliance. Then she and I will visit England again in the spring, so she can pass judgment on my family there (she already knows my mother).

Against this backdrop, it seems a detail that I just delivered to Bantam a large and complex novel, Aftermath, concerning the general wasting of the Earth, the collapse of the United States economy, an impotent US president, a serial murderer of teenagers, an exotic and dangerous cult, and an experimental treatment for cancer and life extension. Other than that, things are quiet.

– Charles

With two moves recently, C.J. Cherryh’s life has been confusing. She will be a guest at the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival on March 12th in New Orleans. C.J. may also attend Thundercon in Oklahoma City in February.

Fortress of Eagles, the sequel to Fortress in the Eye of Time, is coming out in January from Harper-Collins. The Dreaming Tree (a reissue of The Tree of Swords and Jewels combined with The Dreamstone) came out this December from DAW. C.J. is currently working on Fortress of Owls.

Milt Rothman’s life has been quiet; he said he’s ready to retire. Milt has no major activities to report for the next year except going to the orchestra, the opera, sundry recitals, practicing the piano (he’s still trying to get to Carnegie Hall), and visiting numerous doctors. He continues to write for Skeptical Briefs, a quarterly newsletter for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. You can check out the CSICOP home page at www.csicop.org/home.html.

Stanley Schmidt will be attending Boskone XXXV in February as a Special Guest, and will be at the Nebula Awards weekend (the first weekend in May) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Good Intentions,” the novelette on which he and Jack McDevitt collaborated, will probably appear in the May or June 1998 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Stan recently had an odd “out-of-genre” sale: the July photograph for the 1999 Appalachian Trail calendar.

The most recent news for Michael Whelan has been the success of his noncommercial work show at the Tree’s Place gallery up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The opening on August 30th was very well attended, with many visitors flying in from all over the country to attend (and buy paintings!). There is an account of the affair at Michael’s web site at www.glassonion.com.

Michael is painting the cover to Tad Williams’ sequel to Otherland, titled River of Blue Fire. In a couple of months he is going to do a cover for a new C.S. Friedman novel and has promised Tor Books some covers. He plans to devote more time to his noncommissioned painting based on themes of his own devising rather than scenes in books.

An unfortunate side effect of the success of Michael’s show is that the paintings that sold will not be available for showing at Bucconeer.

So, Michael expects his art show at Bucconeer to be divided between a retrospect of his illustration career and a very up-to-date collection of the non-commissioned paintings done in the ten months before Bucconeer.

J. Michael Straczynski is working on the fifth season of Babylon 5, set to premiere on the TNT cable network this month. TNT has ordered 22 new episodes from Warner Brothers, plans to replay the first four seasons, and will premiere two B5 movies and a program on the making of Babylon 5.

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