Joe Haldeman signing

World Fantasy Con 2013 in Brighton is almost upon us, and the great and the good of the genre are on their way to the UK. Which means signings! Lots and lots of signings. We’ll give you some more information about who’s where when in the next few days, but first I wanted to flag up one particular event which I think will be of interest to London-based readers of this blog.

Joe Haldeman’s THE FOREVER WAR was chosen, way back in 1999, to be the first SF Masterwork, a remarkable series which is still going strong today. The fact that it was chosen to launch the series should be an indication of just how good it is, and how well-respected a book it remains, now almost 40 years after first publication. I hadn’t read it before that release, which given that it was a Hugo, Nebula and Locus award winner is a bit worrying, but when I saw the first of the Masterworks I thought I’d give them a go, and the sheer brilliance of Haldeman’s Vietnam-war allegory convinced me to read the whole series. I hope most people here have at least heard of the book, even if they haven’t read it, but even if you have it bears revisiting. One of the most powerful and intelligent – but also deeply entertaining – novels SF has ever produced, it – and its later sequels, collected in one edition – make Haldeman one of our most important writers.

But Haldeman has written far more than that. His most recent trilogy (MARSBOUND, STARBOUND, EARTHBOUND) is a great piece of SF, charting humanity’s response to first contact. It has recently been published as one of our SF Gateway Omnibuses/Omnibi/Omnibibbles, and is well worth a read.

Those three titles are all that we have in print at the moment, but there is plenty of Haldeman goodness over on the SF Gateway. I’m particularly fond of THE ACCIDENTAL TIME MACHINE, which keeps on taking the reader places they don’t expect, but I’m sure that they’re all good, even the ones I haven’t read yet. That’s the sort of writer he is.

Anyway, here’s the point: Joe Haldeman will be signing at Forbidden Planet London on Friday 25th October at 6pm. Here’s the link.

If you’re in London, you should definitely go.