A family society is devastated by natural disaster, and a handful of survivors migrates to a strange land and establishes the slimmest of fingerholds. They work day and night to develop its resources, and in time their sacrifices yield a bare subsistence, then a modicum of comfort. In time they begin to prosper. And a generation is born that looks to a bright future instead of back to a blighted past. No matter how often we read this story – Dust Bowl fugitives in California, sharecroppers in the American South, immigrant settlers in Israel – we are stirred by human endurance and determination. Now, change the the strange land to a strange planet and the disaster to a supernova and you will understand why Marta Randall’s Journey and its sequel Dangerous Games are not just great science fiction but a great family saga.

And if you like these books, you will find Islands equally compelling. Joseph Minion, an amazon reviewer, says, “Reading this book is like plugging directly into your soul.”

– Richard Curtis

The one known as “The Sponsor” has absorbed the injection of enhanced DNA and has selected the woman who will play Eve to his Adam and initiate the repopulation of the planet with their Uber-offspring. What could go wrong? After all, isn’t genetics a science?

Ian Watson’s Converts will tell you why London’s Times Literary Supplement compared Watson to H. G. Wells and described him as “a phenomenon, a National Resource to be conserved.” And if you like Converts, check out another wonderful E-Reads titles by Watson, The Fire Worm.

- Richard Curtis

You don’t have to be a scientist to write science fiction but discerning fans live to catch authors in technical errors. “Gotcha!” will never happen with Robert A. Metzger – that’s Dr. Robert A. Metzger (Ph.D in Electrical Engineering), but feel free to spend five or six years of postgraduate study if you’d like to try.

Of course, once you have your scientific grounding you have to do something with it, speculate on what could happen if… In Quad World time suddenly freezes for its protagonist and when it resumes, he’s stuck in a parallel universe. But what a universe! With Joan of Arc and Elvis batttling the “Quads,” Metzger’s imagination is obviously at full throttle. Amazon reviewer Colin Wood, who compared the book’s scientific mystery to “peeling layer after layer away from some globe-sized onion,” said the book was so challenging, “My brain hurts.” “A turbo-speed puzzle that will require you to keep all your neurons engaged,” Wood concludes.

So, inform your neurons that something really big is coming their way, then pick up Quad World. If it makes your brain hurt too, take two aspirins and call us in the morning.

- Richard Curtis

(Pictured above, Ingres’ painting of Joan of Arc)

As I’ve said before, E-Reads is very selective about publishing original fiction, but we were thrilled when Damien Broderick, the award-winning Australian writer, and co-author Rory Barnes offered us The Hunger of Time. Broderick appears in so many “Best of” anthologies that he should consider changing his middle name to “Best of.” His bio states that he coined the term “virtual reality” in a 1982 novel, when the only reality was the kind that skins your knees when you fall on the sidewalk. I haven’t researched the claim but that’s good enough for me.

In The Hunger of Time Broderick and Barnes have created a mad scientist who seems to have read too much H. G. Wells, and, like Wells’s Time Traveler, protagonist Hugh’s time machine works – sort of. That is, it’s accurate to the power of two, or maybe three, or maybe ten. I suppose that when you’re one step ahead of a pandemic and the Pox Cops, you can’t get too fine about these leaps into the Singularity.

Broderick and Barnes can add another “Best of” to their credits. The Hunger of Time is one of the best originals E-Reads has ever published.

– Richard Curtis

When psychiatrists visit psychiatrists what do they talk about? I can guess what Freudian psychiatrist Herbert M. Stein discusses on the couch: his passion for movies. In Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film, Dr. Stein makes his secret life public by revealing the subliminal themes, fantasies and archetypes underlyng such classic motion pictures as Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Field of Dreams and The Usual Suspects. You may not be aware as you munch popcorn that you’re reliving childhood Oedipal fixations, undergoing castration anxieties, or yearning for your mother’s breast. One reason why is that the people who produced the film may not have been aware of it, either. But one reason why some movies affect us so profoundly is that we are resonating to fundamental images buried deep below our personal and tribal consciousness.

Dr. Stein has managed to articulate these themes in a way that makes us want to rush to view these movies again to see what we missed the first time.

And the rental costs are a helluva lot cheaper than a session in a shrink’s office.

– Richard Curtis

I seldom remember my dreams, but a long time ago I dreamed that I stood on the moon gazing at Earth. The exquisite glory of that vision has haunted me ever since and I have longed in vain to return to that sublime moment atop a lunar plateau taking in the dazzling silver disk of our planet. So it was easy for me to identify with the protagonist of Dan Simmons’s Phases of Gravity. Richard Baedecker is a former astronaut for whom standing on the moon has eclipsed all other experiences including love. Baedecker has literally come down to earth, but until his heart returns from the moon he will remain emotionally handicapped.

Having myself stood on the moon, at least in a dream, I can’t blame Simmons’s hero for struggling so desperately to cling to the memory, even if by doing so it takes such a terrible toll on his human relationships. Read Phases of Gravity and decide if you could relinquish your grip on an experience that only a handful of humans has been privileged to have.

– Richard Curtis

Above photo from NASA’s Apollo 8 Mission, the famous “earthrise.”

EMT Rescue puts you right in the cab of Pat Ivey’s ambulance, and if you can’t hang onto your hat it’s not likely you’ll hang onto your lunch as her squad races to treat a gunshot victim, rescue a driver trapped in a totaled car, or apply first aid to a child suffering a seizure. Ivey, a former cardiac technician with a Virginia volunteer emergency team and now teaching her hard-won lessons to others, recounts the true stories of courageous, compassionate men and women like herself whose inspiring efforts stopped the clock and snatched countless people from the jaws of death.

Ivey’s unflinching eye for drama and detail vividly bring to life the tales of heroism that have long gone unsung.

Reader response to EMT Rescue has been so positive that we’re rushing into print Ivey’s other book, EMT: Beyond the Lights and Sirens. Look for it here in the coming months.

- Richard Curtis

Ralph Helfer, the greatest animal wrangler in Hollywood history, has lions, tigers, bears and other great beasts literally eating out of his hand. Applying his unique principles of Affection Training, he has trained such fierce and famous creatures as Gentle Ben, Modoc the world’s greatest circus elephant, Zamba the movie lion and Clint Eastwood’s orangutan sidekick Clyde to strike terror into the hearts of cowering actors — until the director yelled “Cut!” Then they became as tame as house pets. Indeed, some of them actually were his house pets and cuddled like kittens with Helfer, his wife and daughter.

In Beauty of the Beasts: Tales of Hollywood’s Wild Animal Stars, Helfer profiles many of his animal actor friends and shows how his technique of tender loving care subdued hearts and fangs over a career spanning thousands of movies and television shows. His “clients” have garnered eighteen “Patsy” awards — Picture Animal Top Star of the Year.

- Richard Curtis

One of the best-known and most successful ebook retailing sites, our friend Fictionwise, has just purchased the venerable eReader from its current owner, Motricity. We are very happy and excited that Fictionwise has stepped up to the plate and that they will be taking over operations of what used to be the original Palm ebook store. We wish them and the employees of eReader all the best with the transition!

E-Reads has been working with both Fictionwise and the Palm format since the very startups of our companies, back when Palm format books were sold by The Peanut Press (later acquired by Palm and then Motricity). Fictionwise however has had a unique and meaningful relationship to E-Reads, not only because they sell our books in non-DRM (open) format, but because they have been extremely supportive and helpful to us as a small press, giving us prime real estate on their front page for our new releases, right alongside frontlist titles from major publishers. You may have noticed that they even host our ebook download section of this very website! As the ebook industry has grown, it has been thrilling watching Fictiowise not only keep pace, but expand the market with remarkable support for all the divergent ebook formats.

We see some very interesting things going on with this acquisition.

For one thing, the relatively quite small sub-world of ebook publishing is undergoing the same sort of conglomerization and “growth by acquisition” that mainstream book publishing has been dealing with for decades now. Welcome to the big time, I guess you’d have to say. Some win. Some move too slowly and get eaten. The law of the jungle prevails and the fittest survive by ruthlessly absorbing the laggards and growing stronger.

If you look at the history of eReader, though, there’s plenty of room for optimism that this change will be good news for all ebook publishing. Palm devices have been a platform for ebook reading pretty much from the very beginning and the proprietary software, once owned by the Palm company itself before it bifurcated and mutated into multiple entities, is a highly functional and nicely compact program that has benefited from trafficking a fair amount of total ebook readership and sales over the years.

Unfortunately, when Palm sold it off to Motricity, a company whose website slogan is “reinventing mobile lifestyles” and that has a big footprint in handheld content delivery, it seems like it became an ugly stepchild for a big company whose focus was mainly elsewhere. Sadly, not a lot of care and attention was lavished on its development, just at a time when the recovery from the slump that started early in the new century was beginning to turn around in a big way. All along, despite bitter disappointment at the fact that ebooks did not become instantly huge, ebook sales have shown long-term healthy growth…and there’s no end in sight. As the world’s accelerating transition to a digital existence becomes ever more widespread and convincing as a major ongoing phenomenon, the opportunities for any technology that lives in the nerve-center of that transition can only expand and multiply.

At the same time, the brothers who founded and run Fictionwise have shown a broad-based vision of the possibilities for ebooks in the marketplace, coupled with an absolutely catholic commitment to serving the readership across all fronts by making available as many ebook formats as have come along. We venture to guess that more titles in more formats are available from Fictionwise than from any other active source. The fact that Fictionwise has long promoted a DRM-free approach to marketing (while always accommodating the more-paranoid concerns of the big publishers who control the product from most big-name writers) is also a very encouraging sign. Their selection is big and their service top-notch. The benefits of having a Fictionwise account that tracks and remembers all purchases and can replace lost or corrupted files for legitimate purchasers delivers the best possible combination of bookseller, library and display window. They’ve also worked hard at building community among their customers and it wouldn’t be surprising to see them adding Social Networking aspects to their site. It’s nice to know that you can trade up on your hardware and still have access to your library of purchases. [John says: "If I bought a Kindle, I'd have some serious concerns about what will happen when a machine running a totally locked-down system like that decides to die the natural death that all electronic products have built into them. I maybe like a lot of books and love some beyond all sense but that doesn't make me happy if I run into a situation where I have to start buying everything all over again. I'd rather have more control over my digital destiny than any one single proprietary format or device (however technologically cool it may be) is going to allow me."]

Imagine how much better things could become for fans and consumers of the .pdb format now that a company that has demonstrated long-term commitment to and an intensive single-minded focus on ebooks as a business growth opportunity is in charge. Since they also have a savvy sense of the marketplace, having them in control of the development destiny of a neat program that has an active potential installed-base of tens of millions of pocket-sized homes is very exciting. In a market that’s showing continuing strong growth, the sky may really be the limit.

- John, Michael, and Richard

Are you embarrassed to ask your doctor certain questions? Even in this enlightened era, many patients feel uneasy discussing bodily functions, symptoms and diseases. Such qualms are not merely academic — they can lead to dire consequences in diagnosing and treating medical conditions.

After traveling the country and listening to women’s most common health problems, Dr. Marianne Legato, one of the nation’s leading advocates for women’s health and director of Columbia’s Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine, answers these common questions and more in What Women Need to Know. This revolutionary book teaches women how to ask their doctors the right questions and leave the office satisfied.

And take it from me, you don’t have to be female to benefit from Dr. Legato’s sage and practical advice.

- Richard Curtis