Another SF in SF evening: Amelia Beamer's The Loving Dead

It was another great evening at SF in SF: Readings by Amelia Beamer and Mark Van Name, moderated by Terry Bisson, and another delicious cocktail...

My writer-friend Amelia Beamer's debut novel The Loving Dead came out some months ago, and Amelia was doing a reading. I will admit to a soft spot for this book: I was one of the lucky beta-readers. It's a literary comic horror novel involving zombies. The zombie plague is a sexually transmitted disease.

Amelia was looking indescribably cool in a zoot-suit, teal shirt, yellow tie, black cap and rose-tinted spectacles. So I'll have to show you. The drink in her hand is a Zombie Delight, the signature cocktail designed and mixed by organizer Rina Weisman.

She read a section in which Kate, her 20-something protagonist, goes for a zeppelin ride with her sugar-daddy... and another passenger turns into a zombie and starts infecting everyone. Only Kate knows what's going on. Kate, her lover, and a lesbian couple end up crammed in the toilet of the zeppelin...

Mark van Name, an established science fiction author, read from his new book Children No More. He talked about being abused as a child, and brutalized in a program intended to train children for the military. The piece he read was a disturbing and believable description of child soldiers being goaded into killing a bound prisoner by their commander. Later, there was some discussion about child soldiers being historically the rule rather than the exception because boys were considered adult by 12 or 14.

Ellen Klages was there, and Cecelia Holland (who I heard read at the previous SF in SF). A very rewarding evening.