Daniel Keys Moran, author of The Armageddon Blues (1988), as well as the Tales of the Continuing Time series novels: Emerald Eyes (1988), The Long Run (1989), and The Last Dancer (1993), has put up all these fine books on the Web for your reading pleasure. (You can see pictures of the beautiful Jim Burns covers for The Armageddon Blues and The Long Run on Wikipedia. Rest assured that the books and the covers are a perfect match. The Russian cover for The Long Run? Eh, not so much.)
Moran was practically the perfect writer for that cyberpunky moment of sf between the Cold War and complacency — especially if you didn’t usually like cyberpunk. Moran understood computers; but he also understood the sorts of things people do to have fun and make money in cities; finally, he understood the beauty of rural places and highways alike. His ideas and ideals were often ones with which I might not agree, sure. But he told a darned good story and enjoyed telling it, and he didn’t scorn people who didn’t think like him. In fact, one of the pleasures of reading a Moran novel was all the different people you’d meet, and all the different viewpoints you’d get to gaze through. Another was that, even though some amazingly bad things happened in his worlds (he usually starts things off with a nice nuke or two, just to warm up the room, and he’s the kind of writer whose prologues end with “a million years later”), the worlds themselves and the people in them were almost always optimistic, fun, engaged, and interesting. (And he invented calling a computer a “handheld”, which should be worth something.)
I do recommend his novels above any of his stories. That’s just the way it is.
Here’s the important point:
Sometime in the next month or so, he plans to put up the most recent Tale of the Continuing Time, The AI War. This book was written but never published. Until… NOW!
*Maureen does a silent but expressive dance*
Now, I’ve been off the Continuing Time mailing list since… wow, since they moved to that website forum I could never get onto. So I didn’t know until now that Moran had a blog. (As in, not a Livejournal. Yay!) Now, I’d send you straight over there, but what’s the fun in that? (Especially since he’s got a blog entry praising Al Gore. Um, yeah. Whatever.)
So: you might want to read “Infinite Methods” about cutting to the core. “Trent’s Walking Around the House with a Handheld” on what it’s like for an sf writer to see the good bits of his futures take flesh in his own kids. “A Conversation in the Kitchen with Her Father” — a tiny but good fragment of fiction. And that’s just in the last few weeks.
Enjoy. I know I have, and will.
Aliens in This World 
