Posted
9:39 pm
by Ken
The Night Sessions hits the US atheist market
Pyr, the energetic and immensely respected publisher of the US editions of my novels
The Night Sessions and
The Restoration Game, is the science fiction and fantasy imprint of the even more widely respected humanist and rationalist publisher
Prometheus Books. That thought always leaves me with a wicked wee smile, because I knew Prometheus Books
decades before they knew me.
I first came across some of their output in the National Secular Society's old bookshop on Holloway Road, and man, it was like discovering that you had a whole unknown branch of your family who'd made it big in America. And they'd been there for generations.
Robert Ingersoll! A Civil War hero, in his day the most popular lecturer in America, and they had him in print.
Thomas Paine! A Founding Father, one of British rationalism's own legendary figures, and
they had him in print. Along with current writers who were already on my read-everything-they-write list:
Martin Gardner!
Isaac Asimov!
And
lots more. They're not in any way narrow or sectarian in their rationalism. They even publish books by
Calvin. (And
Hobbes.)
Books such as Arthur Strahler's sledgehammering geological labour of love
Science and Earth History: the Evolution/Creation Controversy, and Paul Kurtz's wise, pragmatic
Forbidden Fruit: the Ethics of Secularism were, looking back, essential reading in preparation for writing my own first novel,
The Star Fraction. More recently, Randell Helms'
Gospel Fictions and Victor J. Stenger's
God: The Failed Hypothesis were somewhere in the background of
The Night Sessions.
So I'm very, very proud that Prometheus is running a full-page ad in a forthcoming issue of the atheist magazine
Secular World, showing off some of their
featured books, and that
The Night Sessions is included, in a box of its own at the foot.
Labels: atheism, self-promotion, skiffy
Speaking of American freethinkers like Colonel Bob Ingersoll. Mark Lindley and myself did a piece, "Six Prominent American Freethinkers", which appeared in MRZine several years ago. See:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/fl161208.html
By Jim F., at Friday, June 29, 2012 12:10:00 pm