Alan Smale, Rick Wilber

The Wandering Warriors (eBook, ePUB)

Includes two bonus stories

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A 1940s baseball team finds itself in Ancient Rome in this action-filled romp by two award-winning writers-also includes two bonus stories. In this alternate-history adventure, a 1940s barnstorming baseball team, led by retired baseball player and spy Moe Berg, is transported from rural Illinois to Ancient Rome, just after the death of Emperor Septimius Severus. The Romans-who actually played a game called "small ball"-put the captured team to work teaching baseball to the gladiators for a major Colosseum event.. . that turns into an over-the-top life or death finale. Baseball hijinks, a wild ride through Rome in a careening team bus, a hint of romance, and some viciously good hitting and fielding-but amid all this adventure, will the Wandering Warriors make it home? Will the widowed empress escape the fate her evil son has in mind for her? Will the rattletrap team bus find its way through time and space (and Roman roads) back to Illinois? And what will happen when Chicago White Sox owner Grace Comiskey shows up?

Produktdetails

• Verlag: WordFire Press
• Seitenzahl: 218
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Februar 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781680571233
• Artikelnr.: 59780357

Autorenporträt

Alan Smale writes alternate and twisted history, historical fantasy, and occasional pure SF. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, "A Clash of Eagles", won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his series of novels set in the same universe, Clash of Eagles (2015), Eagle in Exile (2016), and Eagle and Empire (2017), is available from Penguin Random House/Del Rey. Alan has also sold over forty pieces of shorter fiction to Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, and numerous other magazines and original anthologies, and his non-fiction science pieces about terraforming and killer asteroids have appeared in Lightspeed. Alan grew up in Yorkshire, England, acquired degrees in Physics and Astrophysics from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and then moved to the US in his late twenties. He currently performs astronomical research into neutron stars and black holes at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, with over a hundred published academic papers, and serves as director of a data archive that contains the complete datasets from dozens of astronomical satellites and experiments. In what is laughingly referred to as his 'spare time' he also sings bass with high-energy vocal band The Chromatics, and is co-creator of their educational AstroCappella project, spreading astronomy through a cappella in schools across the country. The Chromatics have been Music Guests of Honor and regular performers at many SF conventions across the northeastern US, which gives Alan yet another excuse to hang out with fellow science fiction writers and other really cool people. Check out his Web site at http://www.alansmale.com, or follow him on Facebook/AlanSmale or Twitter/@AlanSmale. Rick Wilber's award-winning stories that merge baseball and the fantastic are published regularly in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine and other magazines and anthologies, with some two-dozen of the baseball-influenced stories in print. The stories often feature Rick's alternate-history version of the famously intelligent baseball player and spy Morris "Moe" Berg, sometimes called "The Professor" for his Ivy-league degrees and ability to speak a dozen languages. In our reality, Berg was a catcher who became a spy for the OSS in World War II and helped thwart the Nazi's plans for an atomic bomb. In Rick's imagination, Berg and his friends travel through multiple realities to fight fascism. Or, in the case of The Wandering Warriors, to have some fun teaching the ancient Romans the game of baseball. One of Rick's Moe Berg stories, "Something Real," won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History-Short Form in 2013, and another, "The Secret City," was runner-up for the award in 2019. Rick has published a half-dozen novels and short-story collections, including the recent Rambunctious: Nine Tales of Determination, from WordFire. Other books include several college textbooks on writing and the mass media, a memoir about his father's life in baseball, and more than fifty short stories in major markets. The son of a major-league baseball player and coach, and a three-sport college scholarship athlete himself, Rick often incorporates sports into his fiction. He is a Visiting Professor in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, and he is the co-founder and co-judge with Asimov's Science Fiction magazine Editor Sheila Williams of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, awarded annually at the International Conference on the Fantastic in Orlando, Florida. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.