A friend of mine, Bob, is a fan of George R R Martin’s work. I personally don’t know his work at all. I follow Raymond Feist most, but also Joel Rosenberg and Jacqueline Carry. But, Martin lives in New Mexico and there was a book signing at Page One Books today in support of his newest work, Inside Straight.

I’ve been to a few book signings before, most notably Douglass Adams, Raymond Feist, Richard Etulain, and Kirmen Uribe. The only one that had even close to the same size as today’s was Adams’. I’m guessing there were 50 people or so today. Adams had even more, but Feist, even though it was in Seattle, only had about 15-20 people there.

This book is an anthology of stories in a shared world, with each story written by a different author. It is a superhero universe, with a long history, created over 20 years ago with a long hiatus until this release. The concept is intriguing, similar to Thieves World, which I’ve enjoyed (and, coincidently, has a similar history — 11 books in the 80s, early 90s with a long hiatus until a couple of years ago — though it is set in a fantasy world).

In any case, it was an interesting book signing. There was no reading, the authors (7 of them were there) introduced themselves and discussed their contributions to the book. One of the authors, Melinda Snodgrass, described her new book, The Edge of Reason, which she described as the conflict between science and magic. It sounds pretty interesting. Anyways, I got Inside Straight signed by the 7 authors there for Bob, so that is cool.