This Wednesday, February 20, at 4 PM EST #TorChat is taking you behind the scenes in some very dangerous places—the minds of several mad scientists. Joining readers will be the mistress of time travel and author of the New York Times bestselling Outlander novels, Diana Gabaldon; the creator of Soon I Will Be Invincible’s Doctor Impossible, Austin Grossman; and creative genius (and by that, we mean mad scientist) Seanan McGuire, the author of the October Daye series, as well as the Newsflesh Trilogy (as Mira Grant). Together, they’ll be discussing the perfect layout to the underground lair, how to perfect your evil laugh, and, of course, the best way to try to take over the world!
The chat will be loosely moderated by editor extraordinaire and mad scientist wrangler John Joseph Adams, a fanastic anthologist, editor, and the publisher of Lightspeed Magazine. We hope all you budding evil geniuses will follow the chat and join in using the Twitter hashtag #TorChat!
JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS (@JohnJosephAdams) is the bestselling editor of Wastelands, Under the Moons of Mars, Seeds of Change, The Living Dead, The Way of the Wizard, By Blood We Live, and The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He’s a two-time finalist for the Hugo and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the publisher and editor of Lightspeed Magazine, and the co-host of Wired.com’s “The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy” podcast. His newest anthology is The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, publishing on February 19th.
DIANA GABALDON(@Writer_DG) is the author of the award-winning, number one New York Times bestselling Outlander novels, which includeOutlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums Of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath Of Snow And Ashes, and An Echo In The Bone, with twenty million copies in print worldwide. She has also written a graphic novel calledThe Exile, and a number of novels and novellas about her character, Lord John Grey, the latest of which, The Scottish Prisoner, came out in 2011. The eighth novel in the main series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, will be published in 2013.
AUSTIN GROSSMAN (@Austin_Grossman) is the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was nominated for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is a video game design consultant and a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and he has written and designed for a number of critically acclaimed video games, including Ultima Underworld II, System Shock, Trespasser, andDeus Ex. His second novel, You, came out from Mulholland Books in 2012, and his short fiction has also appeared in the anthology Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom.
SEANAN MCGUIRE(@seananmcguire) is the author of the October Daye and InCryptid urban fantasy series. Writing under the open pseudonym Mira Grant, she is the author the Newsflesh trilogy—which includes Feed,Deadline, and Blackout—which she describes as “science fiction zombie political thrillers” that focus on blogging, medical technology, and the ethics of fear. A story set in that milieu appeared in John Joseph Adams’s anthologyThe Living Dead 2. Her other short work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Book View Café, The Edge of Propinquity, Apex Magazine, and in the anthologies Zombiesque and Tales from the Ur-Bar.
Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In super-hero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy or otherwise dominate the world as we know it.