Guest post: on SciFi Author Brian Stableford

Today’s post comes to us from nrlymrtl (pronounced Nearly Mortal, not Gnarly Myrtle), webmistress of Dab of Darkness and contributor at Dark Cargo. Thanks to the hardworking folks at Wildside Press who are making a large number of Stableford titles available as ebooks, nrlymrtl has been able to discover and enjoy a new-to-her author. Here’s her thoughts on some of his writings:

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Biologist, Sociologist, Writer: Brian Stableford

by nrlymrtl

In 2012, I discovered Brian Stableford and his Daedalus Mission books (The Florians, Critical Threshold, Wildeblood’s Empire, The City of the Sun, Balance of Power, & The Paradox of the Sets) as published by Wildside Press. The gorgeous, detailed covers on the Wildside Press additions are also an attraction. As a biologist, these books drew me in right away because of the underlying ecological and biological principles as applied to colonizing other worlds. Even on Earth, no matter where we go, we have always had to bargain with Nature, and she has not always been an easy bargainer. Spreading Humanity across the Universe is not only a daunting task mechanically, financially, engineeringly, but also in learning to manipulate new environments and ourselves long term biologically.

And that challenge, met not just in a few years, but rather haphazardly some generations later, is what captivated me about these books. So, of course, I had to read up on Stableford. Who is this man, how many more of his books are out there, and how many should-be-sleeping hours can I physically give up to his books?

The more I learned about this man, the more I appreciated him. This Brit graduated with a biology degree in 1969 and went on to study sociology, complete with a PhD thesis titled, ‘The Sociology of Science Fiction‘ in 1979. At over 70 novels, he is still writing and publishing today, so no worries that I will run out of quality reading material anytime soon.

Over the years, Stableford has provided some interesting interviews where he has shared his views on Dragonlance Novels and his collaborative process with Dave Langford on The Third Millennium. Indeed, I had fun perusing through these, appreciating his honesty on a variety of things. Learning from Locus Online’s interview about Stableford’s French-to-English translations for proto-SF works, I had to look them up. Happily, many of them are published by Black Coat Press, such as the translated works of Paul Feval.

As you can see, there are many, many Stableford works (what diversity!) to keep me happily reading for some time to come. I hope his works also make it to your bedside book cache.