P.S. Bonuses will be canceled this year.

Beware the Hairy Mango – Episode 26 – Double Shot! by Matthew Sanborn Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Beware the Hairy Mango – Episode 25 – Signs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The story’s read by Paul W. Campbell who narrated my story Brothers and Sisters All on the StarShipSofa podcast. Now you can imagine my bears in little kilts. Celebrate your new year with the horrible destruction of cute stuffed animals!

Beware the Hairy Mango – Episode 22 – Today’s Special by Matthew Sanborn Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Today’s the big day! I hope that all of you are out there blogging about StarShipSofa’s fundraiser for Spider and Jeanne Robinson. We had a fantastic response on Twitter yesterday. Thanks to all of you who tweeted and re-tweeted. I saw something like two-hundred tweets about the fundraiser. That’s fantastic. I got a couple of notes during the day from Tony at the Sofa saying how he could see donation traffic picking up yesterday. I’m hoping we’ll see even more traffic today.

Why? Because if people are actually blogging about it today, like we’ve asked, the message will reach people that it didn’t reach on Twitter. We’ll reach science fiction fans who don’t use Twitter and we’ll reach non-science fiction fans as well.

Why should you donate?

THE SHORT VERSION
1) It’s a good cause, you big silly!
2) It only costs about $5.00, American.
3) You get an awesome e-book!

THE SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION
1) From Spider’s Blog: Earlier his year a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski, helped Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of biliary cancer. But it’s so rare even he can’t say how much time he‘s bought her, how soon it might recur—and her latest blood tests have been so discouraging they’ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive…and like many artists today the Robinsons were already running on fumes financially.

2) ONLY FIVE BUCKS! (More if you want to give more!)

3) You get Larry Santoro’s excellent e-book novella, Lord Dickens’s Declaration. Listen folks, a lot of you don’t know Larry Santoro’s work. In fact, most of us Sofanauts hadn’t even heard of him until his stories began appearing on StarShipSofa’s Aural Delights podcast. But let me tell you . . .

Wow.

That’s Larry’s work in a nutshell. I didn’t know this guy from Adam a couple of years ago and now he’s one of my favorite writers. He’s been hiding out in the theater world and in Horrorland, sharpening his pen and now he can slice atoms with it. Larry controls his words, they don’t control him, and at the same time he feeds them out like ten-thousand feet of kite string to play in the sky. They think they’re running free, they don’t know. All the while he knows where every one of them runs and what they’re going to do next.

And Lord Dickens’s Declaration is an absolute blast. Alternate history, steampunky, put-your-brain-in-a-box-and-don’t-stop-shaking-it cool. The story features a world in which historians are the big guns and a computer which stretches across hundreds of acres (sometimes), called The Beast, sends those historians back in time. And let me ask you, have you ever known historians to put things back where they found them? Me neither. And that’s what drives this mad world. It’s 1902 in a world where Jesus ran the Roman Empire and a ninety-something Edgar Allen Poe runs North America. Occam is the man and who the hell is Charles Darwin?

Buy this book. Read this book. Enjoy, enjoy this book. Rest the rest of the righteously smug, knowing that your pleasure is also a Karmic write-off, all 100% of your electronic money is helping good people who are seeing a rough time.

And then tell all of your big-hearted friends to pick up a copy as well. Thanks!