Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 6

You can now read Ratcatcher at Lightspeed SF

Ratcatcher was an all original story I wrote for the collection Xenowealth: A Collection that I Kickstarted and delivered in January 2016. You can now read Ratcatcher up at Lightspeed. It’s an all new Pepper/Xenowealth story if you haven’t read Xenowealth: A Collection yet!

Halo: Envoy Ask the Author (spoilers in comments)

Gray Team fans:

Here’s an open thread to talk about Halo: Envoy and to ask me questions about Oasis, Envoy, or even The Cole Protocol and Dirt (keeping in mind those were written 8 years ago!).

I’ll do my best to answer questions over the next 48 hours.

Halo: Envoy launch week!

Hello everyone. I have a new novel out!

I know, right? This is the thing I’ve been working on over the last year and a bit.

It’s called Halo: Envoy.

Check out the amazing cover by Chase Toole:

I love the new look.

So what’s this about? It’s a continuation of the story ‘Oasis’ that I wrote in Halo: Fractures, but not a direct follow up. Oasis sets up the world of Carrow where Sangheili and humans live side by side in a very tense peace. A peace that you can sense failing in Oasis. Melody Azik...

Cosmic Powers anthology is available! Features my story Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance

I’m really excited about this anthology. It features my short story Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance.

I really love the story. It wasn’t an easy write. Had to do a lot of edits, as I wrote it coming off another huge project and I was exhausted. Like, blurry screen exhausted. But I had come up with the title a few years back in a twitter exchange with Christie Yant and I really, really wanted to find a story that respected the title and did something really cool.

The seed of the story...

Six Things I Learned in My First Month of Using Patreon

Last month at this time I launched a new experiment, a Patreon. What’s Patreon? Think of it like a subscription service to an artist. Some artists just post a Patreon that let us support something they’re already publicly doing, like videos on a YouTube channel. You sign up for a certain amount a month and you get the pleasure of knowing you’re helping them usher something cool into the world. I really like The Nerdwriter‘s videos, and he uses that model:

Other Patreons use more of a ‘subscr...

I Built a New PC Tower from Scratch

When I was 14 I started buying PC Magazine off the news rack back in the USVI. I used to go into the computer stores, where you would tell a salesman what you needed in a computer, and they would assemble it from parts.

My first computer was a 286 25Mhz beast that ran CIV 1 and let me type some papers I purchased from a buddy in school when he upgraded. The 286 died shortly after I purchased it. I parted it out and made enough to put some money toward a word processing machine that then died...

Why I Hope California Goes Ahead With Medicare For All

As part of my attempts to reduce anxiety-loops related to media consumption, when the argument broke out about Obamacare eight years ago I purchased a number of books about healthcare around the world to better understand the global context and options.

I find Americans tend to argue that there’s ‘market’ driven healthcare and ‘socialist’ healthcare. Europe has ‘socialist’ healthcare and that’s expensive, they use a high amount of taxes to support it. America has less taxes, and spends more o...

Game of Thrones as an allegory for climate change

I’ve been mulling this over in relation to a short story idea. I was recently approached to write a climate change short story for an anthology coming out early next year. While doing short story idea generation session I scribbled down the question “how does one create an allegory, a fairy tale, for climate change, that grapples with the lack of human political structure’s ability to deal with a slow-moving, future threat that is of little interest to the day-by-day drama of the polity?”

Whi...

Quick Book Review: The Dance of the Possible

I think this may be one of my favorite books about creativity yet.

One of the things that’s useful about the publishing landscape today is the ability to make books that are the size they need to be. I’m willing to bet in another time, there would have been pressure to bulk this book up, provide more anecdotes, to make it look beefy and solid on a bookshelf.

But this is an arrow of a no-bullshit, humorous book about how to nurture creativity without a lot of the woo-woo that turns me away fr...

The Patreon passes the initial $500 mark, I will now be writing a short story a month for Patrons!

Holy Cow, the Patreon passed $500 and now I get to write a short story that will be delivered every month to Patron’s inboxes. That first story arrives on April 1st.

Let us pause for a moment and celebrate:

Shit, guys, we did it.

That also means we are now 2/3s of the way to the 2nd goal, the one where everyone gets a free copy of my next short story collection 6 months before anyone else can in PDF, Mobi and ePub.