Day: August 19, 2008

Howard and I met Lawrence M. Schoen at Worldcon. I knew him a little bit from the Codex Writer’s forum to which Lawrence and I both belong, so when he snagged the empty chair near us at a party, I was able to introduce him to Howard. That was the beginning of two days of conversations and banter. Howard enjoyed Lawrence’s sense of humor so much, that he asked me to buy copies of the Amazing Conroy chapbooks that were available at a booth across from ours. So I wandered over and picked up Buffalogic Inc, Buffalogenesis, and Buffalogistics. I’m not sorry I did, they were delightful to read.

The Amazing Conroy stories are fun to read. They read much like Niven’s Gil Hamilton or Beowulf Schaeffer stories do, where the complexities of living with aliens are laid out, create a problem, and then the main character solves the problem by applying knowledge given earlier in the story. This kind of thing is very difficult to pull off without it seeming like Deus Ex Machina, but Schoen does it. I highly recommend the stories, although I do recommend that you read Buffalogenesis before reading the second story in Buffalogic Inc. “Telepathic Intent”, the second story in Buffalogic Inc seems to be chronologically last of the stories. You can either get them on paper via SRM Publisher or electronically via Fictionwise. Many other works by Schoen are available on Fictionwise. I may have to abandon my resistance to reading things electronically and check out some of his other fiction.

Lawrence Schoen is also one of the owners of Paper Golem, a new small publisher. I found Lawrence’s intentions for Paper Golem to be truly wonderful. He hopes to provide a publishing venue for Novellas and for single author anthologies, both of which are notoriously hard to sell. I was very impressed that he really wants to provide a service rather than seeking his own profit. Paper Golem has already released it’s first book, Prime Codex. Prime Codex is a collection of some of the best stories that the writers of the Codex Writer’s forum had to offer. I finally picked up a copy just before Worldcon and I’m wending my way through it now. These are all solid stories. I like some of them better than others, but that is merely personal preference because all of the stories are excellently written. I highly recommend picking up a copy either directly from Paper Golem or from Amazon.com.

So in short: Lawrence M. Schoen = nice guy, good writer, worthwhile publisher.