In episode 360 of the Functional Nerds Podcast, Patrick Hester and John Anealio welcome Nancy Kress, author of the new book – If Tomorrow Comes.

About If Tomorrow Comes: Ten years after the Aliens left Earth, humanity succeeds in building a ship, Friendship, to follow them home to Kindred. Aboard are a crew of scientists, diplomats, and a squad of Rangers to protect them. But when the Friendship arrives, they find nothing they expected. No interplanetary culture, no industrial base?and no cure for the spore disease.

A timeslip in the apparently instantaneous travel between worlds has occurred and far more than ten years have passed.

Once again scientists find themselves in a race against time to save humanity and their kind from a deadly virus while a clock of a different sort runs down on a military solution no less deadly to all. Amid devastation and plague come stories of heroism and sacrifice and of genetic destiny and free choice, with its implicit promise of conscious change.

About Nancy Kress: Although she began by writing fantasy, Nancy currently writes science fiction, often about genetic engineering. She teaches regularly at summer conferences such as Clarion West and Taos Toolbox. For sixteen years, she was the “Fiction” columnist for WRITER’S DIGEST magazine, and has written three books about writing (see bibliography).

She is the author of twenty-seven novels, three books on writing, four short story collections, and over a hundred works of short fiction. Her fiction has won six Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” “Fountain of Age,” “After the Fall, Before the Fall, and During the Fall,” and “Yesterday’s Kin”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for PROBABILITY SPACE). cosette-smallHer work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Croatian, Korean, Lithuanian, Chinese, Romanian, Japanese, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read.

In 1998, Nancy married fellow SF writer Charles Sheffield, who died in 2002 of brain cancer. In 2011 she married writer Jack Skillingstead. They live in Seattle with Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

This week’s picks:

* Nancy: Spoonbenders: A novel by Daryl Gregory

* John: Tribe of mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Timothy Ferris

* Patrick: Scourged by Kevin Hearne (Narrated by Luke Daniels) and Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries: The Squirrel on the Train by Kevin Hearne (Narrated by Luke Daniels)

Links:

* Nancy on Twitter

* John Anealio on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page