Photo: Ode to a Bookstore Death

Things We Never Told You: Ode to a Bookstore Death

Event: Blake Charlton Reading

Author Event: Spellbound by Blake Charlton from Suvudu

Lecture: The Future as Mirror

"The Future as Mirror: How SF Uses the Tomorrow to Understand Today"

Science fiction is popularly understood to be about showing us the world of the future: space travel, robots, immortality, encounters with aliens, mechanized cities, human evolution. But in fact much science fiction, though it may be set a hundred or a thousand years from now, is more about the present than about times to come. Both consciously and unconsciously, the futures science fiction writers present arise from and comment on the way things are today, often with the goal of changing the present or even preventing the future.

This talk shows how this has been true from science fiction’s earliest days until now. It gives examples from books and films of ways in which sf had held up a fun-house mirror to the present, both serious and comic, restricting and liberating.

Interview: Joe R. Lansdale

“A detective writer’s mind, and a science fiction writer’s heart” — Joe R. Lansdale on crossing genres, comic books, martial arts, Hap and Leonard … and some ass-kicking!

Interview: George R.R. Martin at Google

George R. R. Martin, the acclaimed author of the Game of Thrones novels -- also a recent hit HBO series -- came to Google for a live-streamed interview where he answered your questions submitted online. The interview, part of the Authors@Google series as well as Martin's book tour promoting his latest novel A Dance with Dragons, took place on July 28th at 12pm PDT.

Martin is a bestselling author most famous for his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of novels that has been adapted to the popular HBO drama Game of Thrones. Time magazine has dubbed him an "American Tolkien". In his series, Martin creates a rich world populated by a large cast of intriguing characters and interwoven storylines.

Event: Brent Weeks Q&A

New York Times bestselling author Brent Weeks stopped by the University Bookstore in Seattle on August 29, 2011 in support of his paperback release for The Black Prism.

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Books vs. TV by Sirfessor

Book Trailer: Mayan December

Mayan December by Brenda Cooper

Dr. Alice Cameron is a famous scientist - an archeoastronomer - devoted to studying ancient Mayan culture. The era driving her career has always been the end of the Mayan baktun, so she's on the Yucatan Peninsula in December 2012 with her daughter Nixie...and so are fellow serious scholars, plenty of end-of-the-world crazies, and - at an international summit - the President of the United States and other heads of state. When Nixie disappears into the past in the Mayan jungle, rationality and mysticism, the present and the past start merging. Meanwhile, Alice is drawn into the machinations of statecraft by an old friend. A savvy scientist, a handsome dreadlocked time-traveler, an ancient shaman, a noble Mayan couple, a computer nerd, and an 11-year old traverse the past and present in a search for the meaning of life and a way to save two worlds.