In my first starred review, Booklist (run by the American Library Association) had some very nice things to say about ANNIHILATION ARIA!

An especially nice excerpt from the review:

Underwood’s prose is brisk and funny without ever sacrificing his skilled sf world building. Highly recommended for fans of action-packed space opera and anyone else looking for a fun and fast-paced read.

What’s a starred review, you ask? According to Booklist, “a star is assigned by Booklist editors to indicate that the title is exceptional in its genre or format.” Pretty cool!

If you want to blast off for adventure with the book that has now earned praise from reviewers at Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Black Gate Magazine, pre-order your copy in paperback, ebook, or audio and board the Kettle on July 21st!

The fine folks at Publishers Weekly have reviewed ANNIHILATION ARIA in the March 30th issue.

My favorite pull-quote is, as expressed in the title: “This is a rollicking good time.”

But the last few lines are pretty good overall:

The interpersonal dynamics are delightful, however familiar they may be, and the tightly constructed world, cinematic fight scenes, and ambitious scope combine to evoke a sense of wonder. This is a rollicking good time.

As a reminder, ANNIHILATION ARIA blasts off in ebook, paperback, and audio this July 21st!

Art by Tom Edwards

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Hi all! I’ll be appearing at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend alongside a bunch of fabulous authors.

The full books schedule is here

The Ivy Bookshop will be selling books by attending authors, so you can find some new favorite reads and meet amazing authors.

Please note that the SFWA activities are taking place at the USM Columbus Center on Pratt St. rather than the Rash Field location from the past few years.

Here’s my schedule:

Friday, November 1

3pm – Success and Goals for Writers
Elektra Hammond, K.M. Szpara, Michael R. Underwood

7pm – Genre-Bending
Lara Elena Donnelly, Jeffrey Ford, Bob Proehl, Michael R. Underwood, Donna Glee Williams, Sherri Cook Woosley

Sunday, November 3

12 noon – Sandman to Saga: Great Comics & Graphic Novels for Adults
Bill Campbell, Scott Edelman, Michael R. Underwood, Alison Wilgus

1pm – Book Signing with Sarah Pinsker and Michael R. Underwood

2pm – Steampunk, Zombies, & Other Glorious Falsehoods
Leanna Renee Hieber, Justina Ireland, Jon Skovron, Michael R. Underwood

It’s time for another ConFusion! This has become one of my favorite cons and I think I’m up to about 5 or 6 years of attending in a row. It’s a great chance to kick off the year with some programming, catching up and talking shop with friends and colleagues, and eating some Detroit Style Pizza.

This year, here’s where you can find me as far as official programming at the con! Apart from these, I’ll be hanging out and catching up with friends in the common spaces, so please feel free to say hello!

Friday 1:00 PM Erie – The Business of Episodic Storytelling
Serialized fiction has experienced a renaissance in the age of the internet. Our panelists discuss the business side of episodic storytelling– What are the trade-offs between self-publishing and going with a publisher like Serial Box? If going through a publisher, how do you pitch serialized projects? If self-publishing, which platform is best for your work and audience? Pablo Defendini (M), Michael R. Underwood, Mackenzie Flohr, E.D.E. Bell (Emily), Christian Klaver

Friday 3:00 PM Erie – A Pro Writer’s Guide To Consultants
There are a wealth of consulting services available to professional writers these days, including paid editing, sensitivity reading, marketing and social media consulting, and career coaching. What can these consulting services offer to trad and indie authors? When are they a good investment, and how do you vet and choose providers? Cat Rambo (M), Richard Shealy, Dan Stout, Michael R. Underwood, Dan Wells

Friday 6:00 PM Dearborn – The Future of Masculinity
Masculinity and “manliness” are social constructs, and like all social constructs, they evolve and change over time. How will our definitions of masculinity evolve over time? How can we portray positive visions of masculinity in speculative fiction? Jason Sanford (M), Pablo Defendini, Michael R. Underwood, John Chu, David Anthony Durham

Saturday 2:00 PM Rotunda Reading
Michael R. Underwood, Ferrett Steinmetz, Patrick S. Tomlinson

Saturday 3:00 PM Erie Autograph Session (3pm)
Meet your favorite authors and get your books signed! Limit 3 items per person, please. Ada Palmer, Angus Watson, Anthony W. Eichenlaub, Cat Rambo, Diana Rowland, Dyrk Ashton, Jason Sanford, Joe R. Lansdale, Josef Matulich, Keith Hughes, Lucy A. Snyder, Mackenzie Flohr, Mark Oshiro, Michael R. Underwood, Mur Lafferty, Stacey Filak, Tracy Townsend

Saturday 7:00 PM Erie Sleeping In Light: A Look Back At Babylon 5
Babylon 5 has been off the air for twenty years. Come join us to reminisce about the best parts, reconsider the parts that haven’t aged so well, and cook up theories of what B5 could look like for a modern audience. Annalee Flower Horne (M), Michael R. Underwood, Scott H. Andrews, Natalie Luhrs

2018 was a hell of a year that was somehow also lasted a decade? I finished and submitted a novel, left the job I’d been in for over five years, and so on. The political hellscape was especially loud, so I found myself diving deep into media for respite.

Here are a few things that brought me joy or at least blissful distraction during 2018:

Games

• Blades in the Dark – I got in on Blades early but only finally got to playing it this year, when I ran a game for Speculate. I explain the game in the podcast episodes, so just head over if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts.
• D&D 5th edition – I played more D&D this year than I have in probably a decade or more. 5th edition is for sure my favorite edition even though I still have some problems with it. We’re two games into a three-game miniseries on Speculate. Shout-outs to Dave, the DM of the ongoing game where I play my good good boy Faelar the Windwalker, Bard With Change-the-World Political Aspirations
• Slay the Spire – A rogue-like deck-builder dungeon-crawler game. Great to play in 20-40 minute chunks as a break from the world.
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – as good as advertised, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as some. Never finished b/c the two times I tried to enter the endgame, I got frustratingly stuck.
• Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle – this is too zany to work, but it does. Mario meets the Rabbids in an X-Com-style cover shooter with strong movement mechanics.
• Destiny 2: Forsaken — this got me back into Destiny and playing with friends. I haven’t played as many different games this fall into winter because Forsaken had enough material to keep us going.
• Hollow Knight – Soulslikes and Metroidvanias aren’t really my bag, but the art direction and gameplay design on this is so strong it carried me through (also b/c I was playing the game alongside some of my favorite games journalists, which meant a lot)
• Battletech – I’ve enjoyed most of the different versions of this universe, including the Clix game, the CCG, and the cartoon, so it was no surprise that I got into Harebrained Scheme’s revitalization of the property as a campaign-driven tactical RPG. I need to finish the campaign at least, and am interested in the Flashpoints expansion’s Campaign Mode for a second play-through.
• Marvel’s Spider-Man – I just got this for the holidays but am loving the version of Peter Parker/Spider-Man it provides. The swinging feels *so good*.
• Mysterium – I’ve only played it twice but I’m already in love with the great art, the strong thematic design, and the collaborative play style.
• The Banner Saga 3 (though I replayed 1 and 2 also this year) – Very dark, but in the “keep fighting because every life saved is worth it” style that I can appreciate in The Current Era (TM).

Books

• The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente – An angry feminist analog to something like Kurt Busiek’s Astro City, The Refrigerator Monologues lays bare the epidemic of misogyny and erasure that superhero comics have perpetuated over the decades through a series of sharply-written first-person accounts from women in a superhero world. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to think critically about the supers genre and especially anyone that wants to write in the genre.
• A Hidden Hope by Laura Ambrose – Delightfully fluffy F/F starring two writers in a Reunited Exes structure, set at a SFF convention.
• A Conspiracy of Whispers by Ada Harper – An excellent dystopian SF romance that delivers excellence in SF plotting and romance character arcs.
• Wanted & Wired by Vivien Jackson – Like A Conspiracy of Whispers, this one impressed me both as SF and as romance. This one is set on earth in a grimy climate decline future, between a post-human fixer and an augmented cyborg cyberpunk runner. Very steamy in terms of the sex scenes.
• The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal – This alt-history opens with a blockbuster movie-grade sequence and just gets better from there, though it slows down into an exciting but also thoughtful story of a woman involved in an accelerated space race to allow humanity to escape climate disaster caused by a massive meteorite’s impact in 1952.
• Exiles: Test of Time by Saladin Ahmed, Javier Rodriguez, et al. – I liked the old Exiles, and this new series is the same kind of fun, with a great art style and fun characters. I’m sorry the series won’t be running for dozens of issues, but I look forward to reading the rest.

Music

• Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae — I was already a huge Monae fan, but this album might be my favorite one yet.
• “Becalmed” from the game Sea of Thieves — Most of my experience of Sea of Thieves is watching the Waypoint team play, and they finished many of their streams by playing this song in the game, making this song my internal theme song to the game.
• The Battletech game OST by Jon Everist – This OST goes a long way to making the game feel like the Game of Thrones in space that it is trying to be.
• Rainbow by Kesha – I liked several of her earlier songs and genuinely enjoyed this album. I’m especially pulling for Kesha after all of the crap she went through.
• The Born to the Blade theme (because how cool is it that there’s a theme song for one of my books)

Movies

• Black Panther – my take on this movie isn’t important. But I loved it and am so glad it’s in the world.
• Into the Spider-Verse – Do not sleep on this movie. It’s probably the most stylish superhero movie I’ve ever seen, and absolutely makes great use of the animated medium.
• Avengers: Infinity War – An incredible feat of cinematic storytelling that I have big problems with even after several viewings.
• Dumplin’ – adapted from the Julie Murphy novel. Delivers a positive message with strong performances.
• Thor: Ragnarok (yes it came out in 2017 but I watched it a bunch this year and love it) – Exactly my kind of ridiculousness and an inspiration for the direction I took the space opera novel in later revisions. I heart this movie forever.

Hi folks! It’s December, which means Award Eligibility Season(TM), among many other things.

This year has had a lot of big life changes for me with leaving Angry Robot, putting out my shingle for consulting work, and more.

Fiction

Fiction-wise, I’ve been working on new stuff that is still not quite ready to announce (the publishing life!), but for 2018, here’s what I did:

I’m the creator and lead writer on the epic fantasy series Born to the Blade, working with the amazing team of Malka Older, Marie Brennan, and Cassandra Khaw. Every episode is a novelette, and the series as a whole would be eligible for awards for Best Serialized Fiction or the like.

I wrote three episodes of the series myself:

Episode 1 – “Arrivals”
Episode 4 – “The Gauntlet”
Episode 11 – “All The Nations of the Sky”

but they’re all awesome and I hope you’ll check out the whole series if you haven’t.

I also published a Genrenauts short story (starring team logistician and all-around badass Shirin Tehrani) called “The Unlikely Turncoat” in the Outland Entertainment anthology Hath No Fury.

Podcasts

I’m also a co-host on two podcasts, which are eligible for the Best Fancast Hugo among other podcast awards.

Speculate

This year, Greg and I re-booted Speculate into becoming an Actual Play RPGcast with a rotation group of SF/F professionals. It’s been an utter blast, and I hope you’ll check it out. We have two complete sessions up now and more coming.

The Skiffy and Fanty Show

I’ve also done some episodes of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, though not as many this year as I was focusing on my writing, etc.

Since going full-time as a writer, I’ve been wanting to find other ways to give back and to create an online community away from Twitter and Facebook to be able to talk about writing, publishing, gaming, and so on with friends, colleagues, readers, and so on.

That led me back to Patreon, which I’ve seen other authors use, and am involved with for Skiffy and Fanty and Speculate.

On my Patreon, I’m sharing essays on the craft of writing, the business of publishing, and the ins-and-outs of tabletop RPGs and talking about those topics with my patrons. I’m covering topics like using the D&D stats as an analogy for evaluating and exploiting your greatest craft skills as a writer, how to create a religious system for your world that feels lived-in and realistic, and how to make your query, synopsis, and manuscript all work together when querying agents and editors. I’m also sharing excerpts of works-in-progress and more pictures of Oreo. I’ve got some big ideas to pursue down the road, like producing videos about writing/gaming/publishing, bringing my stories to new formats (comics, games, etc.), and more.

Here’s my short introductory video:

And there’s more information at the page itself. If you’ve enjoyed my writing on any of these topics or my stories/novels/novellas, I hope you’ll join me as I continue my adventures in the world of storytelling.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been a co-host on the podcast Speculate! Speculate started as a science fiction/fantasy analysis and interview show, “The Podcast for REaders, Writers, and Fans.” We’d talk about books in-depth as well as interviewing authors and hosting discussions on various topics like games writing, health and self-care for writers, and more.

Earlier this year, co-founder Gregory A. Wilson and I decided to reboot the show with a different focus. We did this for a lot of different reasons, which we talked about in a special episode of the show.

The new Speculate is an Actual Play RPG show starring a rotating cast of SFF professionals, including Maurice Broaddus, Jaym Gates, Valerie Valdes, Brandon O’Brien, and more. If you know me, you probably know how important RPGs have been in my academic career and in my life as a storyteller. It’s been a great experience so far, and we’re just getting started.

Our first session was a D&D 5th edition game set in the world of Eberron, and all three episodes are now live. At the end of each session, we also have an out-of-game discussion about the game, a little bit like Talks Machina meets Inside the Actor’s Studio.

If this sounds interesting, you can listen to the first Actual Play episode here.